Psychedelics. Michael Pollan, Netflix’s “How to Change Your Mind”.

There was a time that psychedelics like LSD and mushrooms were reserved for those who were brave enough to face the legal and social consequences of the War on Drugs. But those days are ending — if they haven’t already slipped into the past. These substances are now more widely embraced for their therapeutic and spiritual benefits. Michael Pollan, a journalist, is undoubtedly the most prominent advocate of their kaleidoscopic benefits.

“It’s for spiritual experience,”He explained this to Rolling Stone. “It’s for self-exploration. It’s for setting priorities. It’s for breaking habits. There are all these other ways people are using them. And we have this word ‘recreation’ that we think is negative, but we should go back and think — what is that? Well, re-creation is a very positive thing and people are using them to re-create themselves. And it seems to me that’s as legitimate as any other use.”

Pollan is 67 years old and was baptized only recently in the bizarre waters of psychedelica. But if you examine his work, it becomes clear why he would choose to lead the movement. Pollan’s writings, from food to cannabis to caffeine, have always focused on the effects of different substances on our bodies. His 2018 book offers a psychedelic examination.How to Change Your MindHe was an extension of his investigative interest.

Suffice to say that Pollan’s exploration of these drugs became personal rather than professional, inspiring him to help launch the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. This program’s mission is threefold: researching the physical and social properties of psychedelics; training the tens of thousands of psychedelic guides experts predict will be needed once the drugs gain FDA approval; and educating the public. Pollan is principally involved in the education outreach. “When I first started talking about it around the time that How to Change Your Mind came out, you could sense the resistance in the room if you said anything positive about psychedelics,”He said. However, opinions are rapidly changing.

Now,How to change your mindThis series will be adapted to a Netflix four-part documentary, which debuts July 12. The series takes a deep look at LSD and MDMA and mescaline. It also explains the complex history of these drugs and the therapeutic possibilities they offer for everything, from OCD and depression to PTSD, addiction, end-of life-therapy, PTSD, spiritual insight, and more. Pollan speaks with activists, psychiatrists, therapists, as well as people who have had debilitating conditions treated by psychedelics. The testimonials are compelling and even amazing.

Pollan recently spoke with Rolling StoneThe new series explains why psychedelics can not only alter your mind but also change how society views everything, from climate change to wellness to spirituality.

What is the story behind this series?

Alex Gibney had previously worked with me on a four-part project. Netflix series Can be cooked, the book I’d written before How to change your mindI was impressed by their ability to bring that book to life. So we started talking after this book came out, and it took a little while to put a deal together because it’s, you know, a controversial subject compared to cooking. We also wanted to recreate the experience on screen using expensive special effects. It took some time, but Alex and me persevered and luckily Netflix agreed to let us go.

Netflix has released another series on psychedelics some years back that was very introductory. While yours contains a lot of introductory material, it also offers a lot for people with more experience in psychedelics.

That’s a hard line to navigate because so many people are just being introduced to the subject, yet you want something that has the kind of credibility and depth that will hold the interest of people who are more familiar with it. This was also true of the book. There are many who have said: Who’s this guy writing this book? I know more about psychedelics. But in a way a certain amount of naiveté was useful in bringing people along.

Before I think How to change your mind, most books about psychedelics were written by people well within the psychedelic community, which is great for the community, but it’s a small community and it’s off-putting to people outside it. They’re kind of put off by the evangelical fervor that people sometimes have. So all my books and — this is true of my films too — have the same narrative arc, which is learning. They’re all educations and the process of me starting out as naïve and gradually learning. I enjoy taking the viewer/reader along on my journey, rather than lecturing. I don’t like writing as an expert. I prefer writing as an amateur.

People who are part of the psychedelic group tend to pontificate a lot about them. It is, however, understandable.

Sometimes you want to grab people by their collars and say You won’t believe this! But that’s not necessarily the best way to bring them along.

You’ve had the opportunity to try all the most well-known psychedelics. Which one is your favorite?

I’ve had the most interesting experiences on psilocybin. Is it the most pure pleasure? MDMA is my favorite, because it’s an amazing compound. I didn’t write about it in the book, but we did cover it in detail in the film because it’s exhibiting such powerful treatment effects on people with PTSD, and it’s probably going to be the first psychedelic to be approved by the FDA.

Mescaline has a special place within my heart. It isn’t around as often as I would like. However, I became very interested in it and wrote about it in my last book. This Is How You Think About Plants, there’s a chapter on mescaline where I detail a Lang mescaline trip I had, and it is long. It’s fourteen hours. That’s one of the negatives on mescaline. It’s a generous compound that way, but at a certain point I just wanted to have some dinner and go to sleep and it wasn’t done with me. However, I noticed a distinctive phenomenology. It was different than other experiences, which surprised me. There’s not a lot of hallucinations. It’s very much about the here and now. It doesn’t take you out of your world into another world. It allows you to immerse yourself in your world more deeply than ever before. That was something I found to be very fascinating. It was one of those drugs that you could look at a bowl full of apricots for three to four hours and still get a lot.

The only one I didn’t like that I tried was 5-MeO-DMT — the venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad, which is incredibly powerful, disorienting, ego dissolving, but not in a happy way, in a frightening way. It was quite frightening. I’ve since heard from people who are more experienced with 5-MeO-DMT variously that I took too much or I took too little. I don’t know what to do with that.

The following is something you will discuss in the series: “War on Drugs”And its propaganda This is your brain when you are using drugsAll that nonsense. What has changed in drug messaging over the past 40-50 years?

I think it’s changed a lot over the last five years, actually. I think we’re going from a place where most people had in their heads, you know, This is your brain when you are using drugs, LSD can make you want to leap off buildings or stare at the sun until your eyes go blind.— we’re carrying around this baggage. You get what I’m referring to. IIt was. IThese were my accumulated baggage. I’m a fairly skeptical person and I had absorbed a lot of that propaganda, especially about LSD.

But the identity of these drugs is quickly shifting from recreational party drugs that are dangerous to drugs that can heal, and they’re being associated now more with the treatment of mental illness than they are with, you know, kids doing reckless recreational things. It’s moving from being a youth culture thing to being something that older people are very interested in. So I think we’re in the midst of a sea change in how the public views psychedelics, and it’s happening really rapidly.

Over time, I think people’s curiosity is overcoming their fear — curiosity and desperation. Our mental health is in crisis with increasing rates of depression, anxiety and trauma. You talk to psychiatrists and they’ll tell you they don’t have a lot of good tools for addressing these problems. And that’s why even the psychiatric establishment has greeted this revival of research with psychedelics with open arms, and that surprised me. I thought there’d be all sorts of resistance. However, psychiatry is open to new tools and is in desperate need of them. They want more research. They want FDA approval. Obviously. But they’re not fighting a rearguard action against psychedelics. It’s the opposite.

The series makes you wonder briefly about how monetization of something such as psilocybin could work, considering that most people would only require a single dose in their lives. Is it worth monetizing? Is there any resistance from the pharmaceutical industry? Or are they just waiting to grab it?

The mainstream Big Pharma has not yet shown much interest in psychedelics. From what I understand from my interviews, they’re kind of watching the space. They’re waiting for some small pharmaceutical company — a Compass Pathways or an ATAI or somebody like — to figure out the business model, which is not easy.

These mushrooms can be difficult to grow, so how much can you charge? And yes, you can have it in a standardized pill form and you can do your best to patent the way it’s used, but it’s not like your typical proprietary drug. There will always be a black market that you’ll be competing with. Therefore, Big Pharma should be patient and wait to see if they can come up with a viable business model. This must include selling drugs as well as therapeutic containers.

You will need guides or therapists to help you. And that’s really the expensive part because those people make hundreds of dollars an hour for many, many hours. The pharmaceutical industry will buy a company that has found the best way to do this. I mean, that’s what passes for innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. They wait until a small company has a new product, and then they buy it. So I think that’s what will happen.

I believe that psychedelics, if they are not in a medical container, will thrive. There will be other containers. There will always be an underground. I don’t think that’s going anywhere. It will expand. The underground will not only be used for therapy but also for sales. This guide will provide guidance.

I also think you’re gonna see a rapid growth in the religious use of psychedelics, which are called entheogens. I keep hearing about new churches sprouting up everywhere where they’re using psychedelics in a sacramental way. And given the jurisprudence around religious freedom of this particular Supreme Court, it’s going to be very hard for them to say that this is not legitimate. Right now, religious freedom is being defined in such a wide way. Three already exist, of course. The Native American Church, which I discussed in great detail in This is Your Mind on PlantsThen there are two more ayahuasca congregations. All three of them have the right to use any psychedelic in worship. So I think we’re gonna see growth of this religious use, medical use and, you know, whatever we want to call the betterment of well people.

Many people mentioned in the series how their psychedelic experience led to a realization. “wholeness”Oder “oneness”Everything. It’s a consistently repeated experience that sometimes gets glossed over in the talk of specific therapeutic benefits relating to conditions like depression or PTSD. What do the studies say? It is possible to experience it yourself.

Researchers speak of mystical experience. It has a very specific psychological definition. There’s a scale of the mystical experience that goes back to [philosopher] William James, and it’s been updated by several people since. It also includes the feeling of merging with an entity larger than you: transcendence space and time, this noetic ability that what you saw or believed was not only an opinion but revealed truth. These experiences are very fascinating. This has been observed by a lot of the research, that about two-thirds of people on a high dose of psilocybin have what’s called a “mystical experience.”

Two mushrooms, one of which I believe qualifies, were my two. One was unguided in my garden in New England, and I had this experience that all the creatures in my garden — the dragonflies and the flowers and the other insects — were more alive than I had ever appreciated, and in fact were all conscious. I believe that consciousness is attributed to more species than any other time. I was able to return my gaze to the plants. This was a great idea. Now, I’ve always given a lot of credit to plants. It was intellectual conceit that I wrote a whole book on how plants manipulate humans. Now, I feel it for the first-time. Their presence was tangible to me. Their personhood was apparent to me. It was amazing.

As I mentioned in the other time How to change your mindThe experience of ego dissolution was a mystical experience. My sense of self had burst in a cloud made of blue post-it notes, and then it kind of fell to the ground and became a pool of blue paint. That was me. I was observing this from some new vantage that I’d never had before. It was as if I had no self. My guide was playing this Bach unaccompanied cello suite — #2 in D minor — I’ll never forget it: I had an experience of music the likes of which I’d never had. I was completely in tune with the music. It was one with me. It was me, I was it. I could feel the horsehair bow running over my skin.

It’s amazing how a person can have such a powerful experience but have no way to explain it to another person.

Ineffability ranks high on the list of mystical experiences. These experiences can leave you feeling overwhelmed and unable to find the right words. Although it was hard to write about them, I eventually found the words. It was a long process.

There’s a lot of talk about how psychedelics can benefit the individual, but what about communal benefits? The documentary briefly touches on this in relation to climate change. What impact would widespread integration of psychoactive drugs have on the environment?

This is a very interesting conversation that goes on among psychedelic researchers and us amateurs, which is that, okay, we know a lot about the impact on individuals — it can be transformative. There is evidence to suggest that psychedelics can influence people’s attitudes toward nature or tolerance for authoritarian behavior. So many people believe that this is exactly the prescription for our troubled culture right now; that if lots of people have psychedelic experience we will have more nature connectedness — that is something that’s been measured, that people feel more connected to nature after a single psilocybin experience — less tolerance for authoritarianism… so there is some evidence of belief change that accompanies psychedelics.

I will admit to being skeptical. The volunteers for psychedelic trials are not representative of the entire population. These drugs have never been given to anyone who is hostile to the environment. This is a scientific question we have to answer: This belief change under psychedelics — does it always go in the same direction, or does it accentuate beliefs people already have?

And so something I’m spending a lot of time on these days is this new psychedelic research center that we started at Berkeley, where we’re going to be doing basic science research about psychedelics but also socialScience research on psychedelics. And one of the things we’re going to investigate is this very question — how do beliefs change under psychedelics? — using a demographically representative population of volunteers that has conservatives as well as liberals. This will hopefully give us a better base to evaluate those belief chains before we put them in the water supply.

Psychedelics weren’t part of your life until relatively recently, but it seems like you’ve really gone in with full steam. So do you think you’ll continue being a part of the movement? What’s next for you?

I’m working on another book that is not primarily about psychedelics but will have an element of that there. It seems to be popping up. It’s a book on the quest to understand consciousness, human consciousness — where it came from and what it’s for and how does, you know, three pounds of grey tofu in between your ears produce the experience of being alive? And it’s a question that psychedelics put front and center, right? There’s no one who takes psychedelics who doesn’t start wondering about consciousness. It’s kind of like when you smudge the clear pane of consciousness — as psychedelics do — you suddenly say, Oh, there’s a pane there! So psychedelics play some element in that, but it’s not primarily a book about psychedelics.

It takes up a lot time. I’m one of the co-founders and I’m on the executive committee. It’s a startup, and we’re busy designing experiments and finding office space and hiring staff. But it’s very exciting to be involved with. Scientists are thrilled to be able work on this. Anyone who studies the mind — psychiatrists, psychologists, neuroscientists — a surprising number of them have psychedelic experience, and I think that’s probably what got them into it. Most of them feel that this is a career killer. This is why it is suicide for them to continue working on it, as well as for their graduate students. All that’s changing. The stigma is lifting and they’re very excited to do this work. So I think we’re gonna learn some really amazing things in the next five years. Not only at Berkeley but all over the world as this field develops. There are now at least 12 psychedelic research centres in the United States at top universities. So when you put good minds on that problem you’re gonna get some interesting results.

What advice would you give to someone who is interested in trying psychedelics?

It is important to approach it with care. It’s a very consequential thing to do. There are also risks.

This is if you’re working at a high dose — I’m not talking about micro doses and things like that — but if you’re working with a high dose, make sure you have somebody with you who knows the territory. Don’t do it casually. Give a lot of thought to where you’re going to be: the set and setting, as Timothy Leary called it. Make sure you’re in a safe place and you’re in a good frame of mind. These are all important.

You should also find someone to talk it over with. I think it’s really important. Interpretation of these experiences can be just as important as the actual experience. This can be quite confusing. But with the help of another person, it can be made into a narrative and you can draw a lot of valuable lessons. But they don’t just appear to you. You must work hard at it.

Many people can relate to these experiences. I saw God Or The plants were talking to my earsThey just took it out and put it in the box they called “drug experience”They let it go. It wasn’t the drug that gave you those thoughts or images: it was your mind. Drugs are catalysts. So it’s worth trying to understand what your mind is trying to tell you.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.