Science Friday - Michael Pollan On Mind-Altering Plants, A Second Pandemic Winter. December 10, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

How America Is Preparing For Another Pandemic Winter The weather is getting colder, the days are getting shorter, and the world is approaching the two year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like last year, experts are wary that a winter surge in cases could happen again this year, even with the protection of vaccinations. The Biden administration is trying to get ahead of this possibility, especially as the Omicron variant looms. A new plan prioritizing booster shots and testing has been released to get the country through another pandemic winter. Joining Ira to break down this and other science news of the week is Umair Irfan, staff writer for Vox based in Washington, D.C. They also discuss the latest information on the Omicron variant’s virulence and genetic sequencing, and take a look at the complicated world of conserving the rarest marine mammal, the vaquita.   Three Plant-Based Chemicals That Can Change Your Brain If you’ve enjoyed a cup of coffee, tea, or certain soft drinks today, you’ve been making use of the mind-altering properties of the chemical caffeine, which bestows an alert buzz. And we probably all know a coffee addict, who becomes cranky and irritable without their morning mug. But there are also other plant-based compounds that affect the mind’s consciousness, including opium and mescaline—and the use of those compounds isn’t seen as acceptable in modern society. In his book This Is Your Mind On Plants, author Michael Pollan looks at the way these three compounds have been adopted or shunned by various cultures, and why. He joins Ira to talk about the science behind their action, the history of their use around the world, and the societal and cultural factors that go into deciding which drugs are seen as acceptable by a community. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Did you enjoy that little buzz from your coffee or tea today? Well, if you did, you're using a plant-based chemical caffeine to alter your consciousness. Our love affair with caffeine is just one of the person-plant relationships author Michael Pollan looks at. In his latest book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, and he is my guest this hour. First, Omer Rufad is going to join us with the latest news, and there's a lot of stuff that's going on this. hour. Mumerifan, staff writer of Vox and Washington. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me back.

Nice to have you. Walk us through this winter COVID-19 plan that President Biden has talked about. Right. The White House is gearing up for what might be another winter surge, and they're trying to get ahead of it with this multi-pronged plan. And the key components of it are going to be shots, testing, treatment, and outreach.

And that's particularly crucial as the Amacron variant takes root. And what does he actually talk to me? You talked about, well, he actually talked about a pathway. What's our pathway through the winter? Well, the key thing is to get people vaccinated. You know, in the U.S. right now, there are still about 30% of Americans who remain unvaccinated. And if you're not vaccinated, the goal is to get people vaccinated.

And if you have been vaccinated and it's been more than six months since your course of treatment, then you should be getting a booster. And the FDA just this week expanded the eligibility for COVID-19 vaccine boosters to 16 and 17-year-olds. And so the goal is to get people individually as protected as possible. Then after that, you know, we want to increase testing for the virus, especially as we're trying to get ahead of this new variant that might be more transmissible. And so the Biden administration just recently purchased a whole bunch of these rapid tests and they're distributing them around the country. They're also issuing new guidance for health insurance companies to make sure that they're still paying for testing services. well. And we're trying to make those tests more accessible as all as like part of a strategy to

try to figure out where this virus is. And they're also putting together the strike team. So if there is an outbreak, they can send additional medical personnel to help hospitals cope with, you know, a surge in patients and help administer treatments and do contact tracing. About 30% of Americans remain unvaccinated. Is this plan any different than the outreach that's already been happening? That's one of the main criticisms here. It's really hard to change the playbook and a lot of the people that are not vaccinated are not vaccinated for political reasons. In fact, a lot of research seems to show that people, it's not just hesitancy, it's active refusal and a lot of that falls along political lines. And it's really hard to change

people's minds on that front. But, you know, they're still trying to convince some of the holdouts to get on board. But the strategy there hasn't really changed all that much. And of course, the availability of test has been a problem for a lot of people. Do we see things changing enough? under this plan. That's key. You know, by buying these millions of tests and distributing them, they should be more accessible. You can still buy them at pharmacies right now, but they cost about $10 a test. And for people who need to take tests a lot really frequently, that might still be too much.

And so there's still work being done on trying to bring the cost down, making them freely accessible, particularly for people in high exposure settings, like schools, hospitals, and prisons to make sure people can get tested, basically daily to try to make sure that they catch outbreaks right at the outset so they can start treatment and isolation. Let's move into some other COVID news. The Omicron variant is, as we've said, looming in the background for a lot of us. But we're kind of in limbo right now because there's a lot we still don't know about it. What do we know so far about how current vaccines work against this variant?

Well, Pfizer and BioN Tech this week, they developed the RNA COVID-19 vaccine. They posted some early results about how well their vaccine works against Omicron. And they found that the initial two-dose vaccine doesn't really hold up that well. They found that there was a very significant reduction in protection from antibodies against this variant. But the critical finding was also that a third dose, a booster shot ramps that protection right back up. And so it's very critical, according to these results, to get boosted to help deal with the Amacron variant. Yeah, and there was a report out of San Diego this week that a person tested positive for the variant, and this person was double vaccinated and boosted.

Is this cause for concern? It is definitely cause for concern, but perhaps not yet alarm, because what we've been seeing so far with many of the cases, especially with these breakthrough infections, is that they've been fairly mild. The people are not getting very severely ill, and this kind of lines up with a lot of the information we're seeing coming out of South Africa,

you know, where they first identified this variant that a lot of the cases and breakthroughs have been, not that severe very fortunately. But health researchers that I've talked to said that, you know, we should still be cautious because this variant does appear to be more transmissible. So while it may lead to less severe disease, if more people overall get infected, that could lead to a larger health burden than we may realize. And we still don't know how virulent domicron is, do we? Right. We still need to wait a few more weeks, basically, to get that data in the real world to just see exactly what the outcomes are. Because some of the initial cases are among younger people who are generally healthier.

or once this moves into older adults or people with weakened immune systems, we may see a very different picture. Let's move into something really interesting, a story that reminds us that sometimes happy coincidences happen in science, too. And I'm talking about new research has found that chances of developing Alzheimer's disease was decreased by using what, Viagra? That's right, Viagra. This drug that itself was also formed by a happy accident.

You know, it's known by the name'sil denifil as well. well, it was initially developed as a blood pressure drug, and it's later found that it could also treat erectile dysfunction. So a group of researchers actually looked at insurance claims from more than 7 million patients, and they found that they saw an association of a 69% reduction in Alzheimer's disease among Viagra users. And how did they figure this out? Well, they looked at, you know, these insurance claims, and the key thing about the study is, of course, that this is a correlation study. They don't quite know what the mechanism is here, and the research just say that they still need to do a randomized control trial to figure out exactly what is the effect.

There could be some other confounding factors. Like if you're using Viagra, odds are you may have good social relationships. And that might be a key factor in reducing Alzheimer's risk or you may be generally healthier in other ways. And so it's not quite clear. But what's also exciting about this is that we don't really have a good idea of what causes Alzheimer's disease to begin with. You know, there's a lot of different theories about it. And so there's like the amyloid hypothesis about these protein plaques, but since Viagra acts on blood vessels, there could be something involving blood circulation as well. And Alzheimer's is a disease.

Nobody wants, so this seems potentially like a huge deal, isn't it? Right. You know, earlier this year, the FDA made a controversial approval of another drug to treat Alzheimer's disease from this company called Biogen, and the FDA's own advisors actually said that they shouldn't approve it because the effect was so low and that that drug cost about $60,000 dollars per patient. But it shows you that, you know, Alzheimer's disease is a very devastating disease. It causes, you know, neural degeneration. It destroys people's ability to function on their own. And so they're saying that the glimmer of hope, even with a very expensive and

maybe not that effective drug, is worthwhile. So seeing an effect like this with Viagra, with a drug that's already approved could be quite promising in terms of coming up with better therapies in the future. Terrific. Let's move into a story about the rarest marine mammal, the Vakida. I have to admit, I don't know a lot about this creature. Where do they live? And how many are there? Fill us in on this place. Sure.

My colleague Benji Jones went to look for the Vakita. And, you know, at Spanish for Little Cow, they're very adorable. They look like something of a cross between dolphins and pandas. And they live in this very narrow area in the Baja Peninsula and the Gulf inside Mexico. And there may be fewer than 20 left, which is why you don't hear all that much about them. and conservationists have been struggling even to find them and just get a good count on their numbers. And, of course, because they are the most endangered species of marine mammal, you know, conservationists say that, you know, this is a really important case study.

If they can pull off a recovery, there's a lot we can learn for other animals. But if we don't pull this off, then, you know, this could be a very sad, cautionary tale. You know, this seems like a really great example about how conservation is not always straightforward, right? It can be complicated. Well, right, because one of the concerns here is that, you know, these vacitas are threatened by local fishermen. And these are not big commercial fishing operations. Many of these are from local fishing villages that are, you know, counting on fishing for subsistence. And so they need to be able to harvest their catch from the ocean, but do it in a way that perhaps doesn't harm the Vakita.

And so there are some approaches like technologies, like using, you know, better gill nets that can help the Vakita, you know, escape or, you know, using a better set. using a better census and trying to identify where these mammals are and trying to encourage fishermen to avoid them and, you know, coming up with incentives. But they're also, you know, because they're poor, they're facing a lot of economic pressure, particularly for another endangered species in that area called the Totoaba, which has, you know, use in Southeast Asian and East Asian traditional medicine. And so there's this international market pressure for doing more fishing in this area. And so conservationists have to work with local fishermen and other economic constraints to try to actually salvage the species.

All right, let's end with a story of a sort of a meta story about the actual science of science experiments. It turns out that there's a replication problem, right? Right. You know, we've talked a lot about this replication crisis in social sciences and a lot of these behavioral sciences, but also in hard sciences, there have been some issues with trying to reproduce old experiments. And so the Center for Open Science decided to examine research in cancer from 2010 to 2012, looking at about 50 studies and 23 experiments. And by trying to reproduce those studies, they found that about 59% of those findings could not be replicated.

And of those that they could replicate, they found that the effect was about 85% smaller. Hmm. Well, that sounds really something we need to keep track of. Thank you, Vermeer, for taking time to be with us today. My pleasure, Ira. Thank you for having me. Romer Fon is staff writer for Vox based in Washington, D.C.

We have to take a break on when we come back. Our ongoing relationship for plants that can alter your mind, remember I told you that Michael Pollan is going to join us. Well, he's going to be here with us, and we'd like you to join in that conversation. You can give us a call. Our number is 844-8255. That's 844-Sci Talk. And, of course, you can tweet us at SciFri. Michael is the author of a new book.

This is your mind on plants. And wait until he talks about his experience trying to grow some of these in his backyard. It will be the 20th year, the 20th anniversary. that Michael Pollan has joined us. We were looking back into our archives, and we found out he was back in 1991. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. Hey, Ira here with an exciting message. Science Friday currently has a dollar-for-dollar donation match in effect. This means that any donation made through December 31st will be doubled, including yours. Now, I don't have to tell you that the need for Science Friday is stronger than ever.

head over to ScienceFriday.com slash support to make a gift. We depend on the generosity of fans and listeners. Again, that's ScienceFriday.com slash support. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm I Replato. I talked a bit about that buzz you get from coffee or tea today. You know, if you did, as I mentioned,

you're using a plant-based chemical called caffeine. And, of course, it alters your consciousness. Michael Pollan has written a lot about caffeine. caffeine and a couple of other mind-altering drugs in his new book. And if you'd like to join our conversation, you can give us a call 844-724-8255-8-44-Sai-4-C-Talk or tweet us at Cy-Fry. Michael Pollan is a journalist and author of This Is Your Mind on Plants. Welcome back to Science Friday, Michael. Thank you, Ira. Very good to be here. 20 years. Seems like yesterday. I know. I was shocked when you said that.

10 years, wow. I wonder what we were talking about in 1991. I know what we were talking about. In fact, I mean, we were talking about you growing marijuana in your backyard in Connecticut. Do you remember that? Things haven't changed. No, my interest in psychoactive plants is longstanding. I'm really glad that habit is now legal, at least where I live. Well, I'm seeing a trend in your writing. Going back those years, he used to write mainly about food and diet and now your last two books, how to change your mind. and this last one, your mind on plants, takes a whole different track. Why is that? Well, the two subjects don't seem quite as diametrically opposed to me as they do to perhaps to some listeners or readers.

My basic underlying fascination in writing is writing about our relationship to plants and all the different things we use them for and all the ways they use us. And so if you're focused on that, and it was a focus I developed as a gardener, actually, when I was, you know, quite young, you're going to look at food because food is probably the most important way we use plants and they use us. And so I wrote a series of books, as you know, about that and our relationship to things like corn. But, you know, there's this other very curious use to which we put plants, and that is to change consciousness. And that's always struck me as a fascinating human habit. You know, why do we have it? What is it good for? Isn't it dangerous?

You would think that the desire to change consciousness, which appears to be universal across cultures, there was only one culture when they surveyed a bunch of them in the 70s that did not have a consciousness-changing plant. And that was the Inuit in Greenland. So the only reason was nothing good grew where they lived. So why do we have this universal desire? And I've been chewing on that one for quite a while. Good. Good way to put it.

You chose three plant-based compounds. Tell us about why you chose what they are and why. I chose those three above anything else? Sure. I mean, there were a lot to choose from. But I wanted one that was a stimulant, and that was caffeine produced by coffee and tea and a couple other plants. I wanted one that was a depressant, and for that I had opium, produced by the opium poppy. And I wanted a psychedelic.

These are basically the three major categories of psychoactive drugs, you know, uppers, downers, and what I think of as outers, the psychedelic being the outer. And for that, I chose mescaline, which is produced by a couple different cacti. And does every culture have this kind of relationship with some plant or other? Absolutely. It just appears to be this universal human desire. And there are very few examples of cultures that don't use some plant this way. Some of them are, you know, totally innocuous. Things like caffeine, nobody thinks twice about the fact that we're all 90% of us on the planet are using the psychoactive drug every day. And then some are kind of obscure and very specific to individual cultures.

But it's a human given. There's something about us that just isn't satisfied with everyday normal consciousness. And we seek and we go to great lengths and risks to vary it in different ways. You know, whether it's the kind of sharpening of focus and the energy lift we get from caffeine or the desire to transcend our everyday lives, ourselves, with something like a psychedelic, which, you know, those two, we think of psychedelics as a very modern phenomenon, a product of the 60s. But my research found that the use of mescaline by indigenous peoples in the Americas

goes back at least 6,000 years. And there's evidence for ancient psychedelic use in many different cultures. usually as a sacrament or to heal or for divination to, you know, see what's going to happen in the future. So this is a very old and deeply ingrained habit that we have. And, you know, so what is it good for is an interesting question. I mean, one thing we use psychoactive for, of course, is to decrease pain. And opium, of course, is the classic example. And you would see why that would be very adaptive to have some sort of substance.

that relieved pain. Because for most of history, what was medicine about except relieving pain? There were not a lot of cures on offer. So opium has played a critical role, and that too has been used for thousands of years. But then we use drugs that don't eliminate pain that do other weirder things. And some help us work, some help us relieve boredom, and some help us have experiences of another world. The way the psychedelics, you know, which may have been used in early religion, may be responsible for some of the visions of an afterlife, of a underworld, of a just another dimension that underlies so many different religions.

And it may be, you know, we may have to credit those visions to psychedelic substances. And you tried to get into that world, didn't you? I did. I was very interested in mescaline. It's kind of the orphan psychedelic. When I wrote How to Change Your Mind a couple years ago, I focused on psilocybin, which is being used a lot in research. And I talked a lot about the history of LSD. But mescalin was, you know, really the first psychedelic to be discovered in the West. You know, William James fooled around with it, apparently, and other scientists around the turn of the last century, around 1900.

And it was the first psychedelic to be isolated and synthesized. And then it disappears. Oh, it's the one Aldous Huxley wrote about, too, and Doors of Perception, which is, you know, one of the most beautiful books about transcendental experience that's been written. And he had a mescaline trip in the 50s that really changed his life. But then it disappeared. And I was trying to figure out why. And one reason is that LSD is, which is similar in its effects, is easier to find and you use much less of it. I mean, doses of LSD are, measured in micrograms, millions of a gram. And of course, when you're in a legal drug market, less is more, right?

The lighter and smaller the drug, the less likely you are to get caught. Whereas mescaline, you have to take something like 400 milligrams, so it's like two fat capsules. But the other reason I was interested in mescaline, though, is that it has been used continuously by Native Americans and extensively in the last hundred years. in what is called the Native American Church, which is a trans-tribal church of Native Americans who have the legal rights since 1994 to use mescaline, and they do it in the form of peyote, which is a very inconspicuous, beautiful, low-lying, bluish-green cactus that grows only in a small area along the Rio Grande, on both sides of the Rio Grande.

And I was very curious to find my way into that subculture because it proposes a very different approach to psychedelics. You know, we kind of think of psychedelics as being very disruptive to society and very radical. And in some ways it was in the 60s. But in the Native American church, the role of peyote has been to promote social cohesion, community building, community preservation under the threat of, you know, know, colonialism and occupation. And it's a profoundly conservative drug in that context and has done a lot to preserve Indian identity in America as well as healing. It's used to treat alcoholism and social problems in the community. And it's like 250,000 people strong. It's a major church in America. And it proposes a very different use of drugs we regard as, you know, dangerous and

illicit. Our number 844-825, let's go to the phones if you have a question for Michael Paulin that you would like to ask him. Let me, let's go to, let's go to Portland. Hi, welcome, Sean. Oh, hey, yeah. So I had a question on what the best way to fight the stigma that you were talking about, you know, the illicit drugs that we consider illicit. I mean, we drink coffee to wake up, we take melatonin to go to sleep, but I can't smoke a joint and then operate heavy equipment a month later. So what's the best way to fight that stigma? Well, you people in Oregon are doing it.

You know, you passed two pieces of legislation in the last election that are profoundly going to change, I think, the whole drug landscape. The one I'm particularly interested in is a measure that will legalize psilocybin, not just decriminalize the drug, but actually obligates the state, State Department of Health, to train and license guides, train facilitators, and train and license growers of psilocybin so that people may have, in a safe and unstigmatized way, a psilocybin experience, whether they have a mental illness diagnosis or just want to do it for spiritual development. I think that what's destigmatizing psychedelics is, you know, the voters speaking out that they think the drug war is, you know, a dead end, and they want to see it end. But also

the research that's being done, you know, we have had an incredible string of papers coming out about the value of both psilocybin and MDMA, also known as ecstasy, in treating mental health problems, which are epidemic right now. And nothing has done more, I think, to change the image of these substances than this research. And it's changing the image of things like ecstasy, which was a rave drug, a counterculture rave drug, or psilocybin, which was a counterculture psychedelic, to think of them as medicines, as productive tools for treating some of the most serious problems we face. The other thing that I think affects this stigmatization, frankly, is the fact that many people are in the closet about their own use of these substances.

It was either embarrassing or reputationally risky to write about having psychedelic experiences. And the more people come out and talk about it, which is happening. I mean, you know, Will Smith apparently writes about this. in his book, and there are great many celebrities have recently talked about the value of their ayahuasca experiences or other psychedelic experiences. So I think we're on the way to normalizing the use of these substances, and I think that's a healthy thing. You point out in your book, the irony is that the legal drugs are killing more people than the illicit drugs. Yeah, well, you know, what's really striking, so I wrote a chapter in the book about opium.

And my experience growing opium poppies and trying to make an opium tea from it, or loudonym, which is opium poppies dissolved in alcohol. And in the 90s when I was writing about this and having this experience, it was at the height of the drug war. And they were cracking down on gardeners, this is the summer of 96, who were making this mild narcotic tea that's served at funerals in the Middle East and relieves back pain and things like that. And while the DEA was cracking down on that practice, and I got kind of caught up in that skirmish in the drug war back then, Purdue Pharma was introducing OxyContin, the very same summer. And that introduction and the way that drug was marketed and the way they lied about its addictiveness and side effects is what gave us the opioid crisis, which last year killed 100,000 people. This is, you know, this was a crisis begun by the legal prescription of drugs, not by the illicit use. And I actually think that irony, if we can call it that, is part of what is, you know, cutting the legs out from under the drug war. While we were putting in so many billions of dollars to, you know, defeat a legal drug use,

we were promoting legal drug use in a way that has been the biggest public health crisis of the last. 20 or 30 years. Okay, let me break in and say this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Michael Pollan, author of This Is Your Mind on Drugs. A lot of people with questions for you, Michael. I'm sure you would understand that. Let's go to Jordan and Santa Cruz. Hi, Jordan. Hi, there. Thanks for being here. Michael, I'm a big fan of yours. You know, you write a lot about how interesting it is that something like 90% of adults use caffeine, the mind altering substance from plants on a daily basis, and how it fuels the economy of capitalism. So I'm curious if there's any other substances in your research that you could imagine people

using on a more regular basis similar caffeine, even if it's kind of out there to think of at the moment and how it might change how we work, how we learn, or even thinking about your book, a place of our own, our built environment. Thank you for your question. Well, you know, we do use other drugs on a daily basis. They're not exactly plant drugs. Alcohol comes to mind. But that's the product, of course, of a yeast, which ferments the plant.

sugars to make alcohol. And so that's one. In other parts of the country, a really interesting example is coca. We're familiar with the product of the coca plant through cocaine, which is, you know, a powerful drug and people really get into trouble on cocaine. But the way it's used in South America is much more like coffee. It's chewed, you know, sometimes all through the day by people, gives them this stimulant, this kind of mild stimulation that also like caffeine sharpens focus, increases endurance, also helps with altitude sickness. And it's used apparently, from what I read, you know, without much problem of abuse. And that there's something about the mild dose you get from consuming it that way. Once you refine drugs, and this goes for the opiates too,

and turn them into white powder drugs, you're intensifying them. And for many of these drugs, that's when you run into issues with abdependence and drug abuse of kinds. But COCA, which Andrew Weil has written about, and Wade Davis, both of whom, you know, Andrew Weil, we know as a doctor, but he's also an ethnobotanist. And Wade Davis, who's a famous ethnobotanist, they make a very strong case for, you know, that we should have coca chewing gum and that this would be a healthy thing and there doesn't appear to be a lot of health risks associated with it. I can't evaluate those claims, but I have

a lot of respect for them as authorities. So that would be another example of a plant drug that could be folded into society without a whole lot of disruption and possibly with some, you know, positive benefits. Yeah, because you point out that people are now doing the experiments they stopped doing back in the 60s and they've picked them up again. Let me get more. Yeah, we've, you know, we've lost 30 years of research. And the other, the other one I'd throw out there, and again, there's not enough research on this yet to say, is microdosing psychedelics, which we can talk about. But that would be a very routine, everyday use of a subperceptual amount of a substance like LSD or psilocybin, which many people believe has positive effects

on their mental health and on their productivity and creativity. I have no idea if that's true or not, but the claims are out there and need to be tested. All right. We'll talk more about that after the break. We have to go to a break. We're talking with the Michael Pollan, author of This Is Your Mind on Plants. Our number 844-724-8255. Lots of time to talk about it. Stay with us. We'll be right back after the short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. We're talking this hour with Michael Pollan about his book.

This is your mind on plants, the way humans interact with caffeine, mescaline, and opium. And you can join our conversation, 844-724-8255-844-side talk. Lots of people on the phone. Before I get to the phone calls, I saw you do a conversation where you talked about why people are so attracted to addictive drugs like opioids and especially heroin. And you talked about the lab animal experiments with rats that I thought was just fascinating. fascinating. Could you talk about that again? Yeah, this was fascinating to learn about. You know, I think a lot of us have gotten our ideas about addiction and drugs from these lab

experiments done with rats and mice. And in the classic experiment, they hook a rat up to a setup where they can press a lever and administer the drug under review, let's say heroin or cocaine, to their bloodstream or with another lever they can administer sugar water, sucrose. And what most lab animals will do face with a drug like that is press the lever for the drug over and over and over again to the point of addiction and indeed even death in the case of cocaine. And this has led to the general belief that it is simply exposure to these substances that leads to addiction, that it is a strictly biological process. But in the 70s, there was a scientist in Canada whose name, I believe, is Bruce Alexander, who came to doubt this idea. And he was

curious to know whether the condition in which the rats were living might have affected their likelihood of becoming addicted or using drugs. So he set up something he called the rat park. And this was a very enriched cage, much larger, with, you know, natural things in it, you know, plants and other rats to play with and toys and good food. And then he set up, and he gave them the choice between the drug and food. And he found that while the rats did still try the drug, whether it was cocaine or heroin or morphine, they used very little of it. In one case, I think it was five milligrams a day instead of 25 milligrams a day. And what that suggests is your likelihood of addiction, if you're a rat anyway, had to do as much with the condition of your cage as with the biochemistry.

And what it's suggested to a lot of people is that we need to look at the environment in which people get addicted. Another great example of this also came out of the 70s, and that came at the end of the Vietnam War. In-country, something like 20. 20% of American troops were using heroin regularly. There was a lot of worry that when these millions of addicts came back, or thousands of addicts, rather, came back to the streets of the U.S., we'd have a tremendous heroin addiction problem. But when the soldiers got back, 95% of them were able to simply stop using heroin without

any treatment, without much problem at all, and only 5% continued. And that suggested, too, that it was the environment, the conditions in which people were living that was determining whether they became addicted or not. So I think we have to keep our eye on this. And it certainly jibes with the – if you look at the geography of the opioid crisis or the meth crisis, these are the poorest parts of America, places where prospects for the future have been shrinking and disappearing. places with lots of other problems. And it encourages us, I think, to look at addiction as a symptom rather than a cause of social problems.

And that argues for a whole other way of approaching it. Let's go to the phones. Let's go to Houston. An anonymous caller. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hello. Hi. Yeah.

Go ahead. Yeah, it's me. Okay. Yeah. So first off, Ms. Paul, and I wanted to say thank you. your book, How to Change Your Mind, was integral in my own journey into psychedelics and solving some issues with depression and anxiety,

and I really appreciate it. My real question, though, was the linkage between, if you plan to write any more about the linkage between sort of the physiology of the body and the mind, I was really interested, particularly in your last book in the last third chapter about the neurosurricular, psychology of it. And I'd also like to hear your thoughts on ketamine, and I will hang up and listen. All right. Thanks for your call. Thanks for your question, and thanks for sharing your story. I appreciate

that. Well, I'll start with ketamine. Ketamine is not technically a psychedelic. It is a legal anesthetic, which at lower than the dose that puts you out, which is how it's used in emergency rooms, has psychedelic effects or so people report. And it has been approved for use in treating depression, and it's showing some efficacy there. The effects don't seem to last that long, but they can be critical in getting someone out of, say, a suicidal episode. So ketamine is an interesting substance because it's legal, because ketamine clinics are being built around the country, that I think will transition into becoming psilocybin or MDMA clinics when those two drugs are approved by the FDA, which is only a few years away. So people are kind of practicing.

How would you create safe spaces in which to administer these drugs? And the ketamine industry is really pioneering that, I think, in various ways. On the other issue, I continue to be very interested in what psychedelics may have to teach us about consciousness. It's hard not to have a psychedelic experience, and I've had several in the course of my research, where you don't begin to think hard about consciousness and what a strange phenomenon it is and why do we have it and is it necessary and how is it that brains produce

the experience of red or the sorts of subjective first person experiences we have it's amazing how little we know about this and how primitive the science of consciousness is in some ways the poets and writers are ahead of the scientists I think, at least in terms of describing it well. But, yeah, I'm very interested. I'm sure I'll be writing about it again in one way or another.

Will I figure it out? I think that's much less likely. Melissa in Portlandia, hi. Welcome to Science Friday. You're next up. Hi, Melissa. Hi, hi, sorry. That's okay.

Go ahead. So my question is, currently, if I'm taking, say, an herbal supplement like Lions Maine, I go to my pharmacist, I go to my doctor, and I ask them, is this going to interact with the current medication that I'm taking? And they have no idea. I think that part of that is that there isn't enough research on, say, Lyons Lane itself that is widely available for doctors or pharmacists to be confident about suggesting whether that's okay or not for you to be taking along with any other medication.

So my question is for you, when do you think that the research would be available and are we going in that direction in terms of silent Ivan or any of the other plans that you've been talking about and written about that it, where you can have a conversation with me, doctor, and be confident that they have enough information and that you, as a patient who might be taking lots of other medicines, that you would be okay to go ahead and take that along with these other supplements. It's a really good question. The issue of supplements is a little different than the issue of psilocybin.

You know, supplements are very lightly regulated in this country, so you don't have to do much research on them, if any, to introduce them. And that's why your doctor doesn't really know about the interaction of, say, Lyons, Maine, which is a kind of mushroom. and a supplement that, you know, many doctors actually think has value. I know I had a conversation with my doctor, and he indicated that the research on Lionsman was encouraging. But it's not the kind of research that gets a drug approved by the FDA.

And until you've gone through that process, which is quite an elaborate and an expensive process, where you look at things like drug interaction, where you look at safety as well as efficacy, we're not going to know the answer to that question in any kind of, you know, persuasive way. psilocybin is not going through, though, the supplement process of regulation. It is going through the FDA drug approval process. So they are actually looking at those questions, among others. In fact, a study just came out last week suggesting there's a general belief that if you're on an SSRI antidepressant, psychedelic treatment like psilocybin won't work very well because both use the same receptors,

serotonin receptors in the brain. But this study came out that suggested that may not be true and that people on SSRIs, or at least some of them, should be eligible to take psilocybin. So whether that is, you know, going to be the conventional wisdom or not remains to be seen. But these are questions that are being looked at in the case of psilocybin. And if it is approved as a drug, drug, doctors, I think, should have the information they need to make a judgment whether it's safe for you to take it or not. We've been talking about the people involved in the people-plant

relationship. But what's in it for the plants? I mean, did they involve in the plants for some reason, or is it a happy coincidence that whatever? Well, it's a little bit of both. What's really interesting about most of these psychoactive plant substances is that they were originally evolved as defense chemicals. They are chemicals that plants produce to keep from being eaten. And they are toxic, like most drugs, in a high dose. And of course, a toxic dose for an insect is different than a toxic dose for people. But what's really cool about what happened here is that plants in general, the ones that produce these psychoactive defense chemicals, have figured out, and I say that, you know, advisedly there's no intention involved, that simply killing your pest with a highly lethal chemical is not a great strategy for defense.

Because as we learned with toxic pesticides, you then select for resistant members of the pest population really quickly. And so we found that various pesticides stopped working after a while. But if your chemical defense is doing something different, which is simply ruining the appetite of your pest, which most of these psychoactive chemicals do, you are not hungry when you take these chemicals. Or simply confuse the pest, you know, make it lose contact with reality. That's a much better strategy. And that may be why. And I'm being somewhat speculative here. I don't think there's any research to prove this particular point.

But that may be why that these defense chemicals are at certain doses psychoactive. They're meant to mess with the mind of predators. Now, what's cool about plants is that they can go from producing a chemical, which they invented, which is incredible in and of itself, these complicated molecules that have, you know, that just so happened to unlock human consciousness, that they can switch from having produced them as defenses to essentially producing them as attractants. And caffeine is a great example of that.

Let me stop you, but let me go for the break because I want, this is a great story. So let me remind everybody that this is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. Talking with Michael Pollan author of the book, This is Your Mind on Plants. Yeah, this is the next question I was going to ask you about. The caffeine bee relationship?

Was that the one you're going to talk about? Exactly. So that's a fantastic example. So caffeine was originally produced, it appears, to poison insects that want to eat coffee plants. When it was discovered, though, that we love caffeine, humans love caffeine, it became a strategy for evolutionary success for the coffee plant, and we spread coffee and tea around the world. But the plant also figured out that if they, a... certain group of plants produce caffeine in their nectar. Now, that's really weird, because if it's a defense chemical, why would you put it in nectar, which is meant to attract insects? Right.

Well, some species, citrus species in particular, figured out that a little bit of caffeine gave a buzz to bees. And... Very well done, Michael. And attract... Actually, we don't actually know if they have any feeling about it, but it does have the effect of attracting them. And the bees that get caffeine, and these tests have been done just in the last few years, return more reliably to the plants that gave it to them. Remember where those plants are and essentially become more, and this is in the words of one of the researchers, more faithful pollinators. So in effect, these plants are using caffeine the way we do, which is to say to make us into better workers. Does that mean they have the same like receptors in the B-B-B-B-B-B-B?

Probably. A lot of these things are preserved. I don't know for a fact, but we have a receptor, adenosine, which is a receptor in the brain that caffeine fits can unlock. It's supposed to, you know, take this chemical that helps us get tired over the course of the day. Adinacine levels rise. We get sleepier, sleep pressure increases, and we go to sleep. But if, the caffeine blocks that receptor, we're wide awake and it stops that action from happening. Whether it's working the same way in the B-Brain, I don't think has yet been determined. I only have about 30 seconds to a minute, but you did the ultimate for your book. You gave up caffeine for a few months, right?

And you survived to tell about it. Yeah, that was one of the harder things I've done. You know, I like to practice immersion journalism. And as you know, in my writing about psychedelics, I've tried mess calls. I've tried psilocybin and just to see what it was like and to write about it from inside. But I also felt I had to do the same thing with caffeine, but that involved giving it up since I was already pretty well addicted. And I had three months without caffeine. And I have to say it taught me very quickly how dependent I am on caffeine, but not only that, how being caffeinated is now normal everyday consciousness for me.

And I don't feel myself without it, which is an amazing statement that I need this plant chemical to feel myself. But there it is. And in this great section in your book that you write about the rise of modern civilization dependent on caffeine and our ability to change our work hours. Well, caffeine had a lot to do with the rise of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. Because if you think about it, before caffeine, the main drug that people used every day was alcohol, because alcohol was safer than water. And, you know, you can't operate heavy machinery safely on alcohol. And if you're going to work the long hours and night shifts, you can't have a night shift without caffeine. It's all in your book.

I have to cut you off because there's so much to talk about and so much in your book, Michael. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. My pleasure, Ira. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Michael Pollan, author of This Is Your Mind on Plants Published by Penguin. It's a great read. Now here's Daniel Petersmith with some of the folks who made this program possible. Thanks, Ira.

Jennifer Fenwick is our Director of Institutional Giving. Ariel Zitch is our education director. Beth Rami is our controller. Nadia Ortelt is our chief content officer. And I'm digital producer Daniel Peter Schmidt. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Daniel. BJ Liderman composed our theme music.

And of course, we had helped this hour from audio engineers Lisa Gosselin and Kevin Wolfe. And if you missed any part of the program, you can subscribe to our podcast or ask your smart speakers to play Science Friday. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato. New York.