How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

Michael Pollan

Allen Lane, $38

Michael Pollan is an unlikely "psychonaut". The professor of journalism at Berkeley and the author of several bestsellers on food, he had reached his 50s before he began extensively sampling psychedelic drugs, including LSD, psilocybin (via magic mushrooms) and 5-MeO-DMT, derived from a desert toad and dauntingly described as "the Everest" of its class.

For this exhaustive book on the history of psychedelics and the promising opportunities for treatment they offer, Pollan, via the toad, obliterates his sense of self. "Like one of those flimsy wooden houses erected on Bikini Atoll to be blown up in the nuclear tests, 'I' was no more, blasted to a confetti cloud," he writes.

How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics.

It is this "egolytic" quality of psychedelics (their tendency to subdue the ego) that some researchers believe might be useful in treating depression, addiction, anxiety and the existential despair suffered by people facing a terminal diagnosis.

Such treatments are being rediscovered. For years following its accidental creation in 1938, LSD was used to help thousands of problem drinkers. Few members of Alcoholics Anonymous realise that its co-founder, Bill Wilson, battled his own "disease" with the help of LSD sessions in Los Angeles.

Research into the compound led to the discovery of serotonin, and to SSRIs, the most common class of antidepressants. But before long, of course, LSD slipped the surgery and, thanks partly to Timothy Leary, was embraced by a generation of blissed-out students.

Richard Nixon drove hallucinogens underground during the drug war, and it was not until the 1990s that scientists and other evangelists began examining the substances again.

Many of these figures turn out to be a little wacky. Among them is the British countess and psychedelic campaigner Amanda Feilding who, in 1970, trepanned herself by boring a hole in her head with an electric drill, believing that doing so would "facilitate higher states of consciousness".

Yet despite some eccentric supporters, initial results from psychedelic trials show promise. In one, 80 per cent of cancer patients reported reductions in anxiety and depression for at least six months following a psilocybin session. A pilot study tackling smoking addiction achieved an unprecedented 80 per cent success rate. "Microdosing" is similarly in vogue: many people, especially in Silicon Valley, are boosting their creativity by taking tiny daily quantities of LSD to push ajar the doors of perception, rather than fling them off the hinges.

Although Pollan warns that "no-one with a family history or predisposition to mental illness" should ever ingest these drugs, their potential dangers are not his main focus. Yet serious problems caused by psychedelics can go far beyond a single "bad trip". Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder is a debilitating condition that Pollan does not mention, but from which a significant minority of former psychedelic drug-users perpetually suffer.

The book's other problems include poor editing (it is too long) and a grindingly slow first chapter. Nonetheless, there seems little doubt that these drugs have far more to offer psychiatry than has been acknowledged. Pollan's exposition will spur exploration into this strange and captivating field. – Washington Post