Introduction -- Opium -- Prologue -- "Opium, made easy" -- Epilogue -- Caffeine -- Mescaline -- The door in the wall -- The orphan psychedelic -- In which we meet the cacti -- The birth of a new religion -- Peeking inside the teepee -- An interlude on mescaline -- Learning from San Pedro -- Drunk at the wheel -- Plan C.
"Of all the things humans rely on plants for--sustenance, beauty, fragrance, flavor, fiber--surely the most curious is our use of them is to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs -- opium, caffeine, and mescaline -- and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs, while consuming (or in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants, and the equally powerful taboos with which we surround them. Based in part on an essay written more than 25 years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world"-- Provided by publisher.