When Michael Pollan was researching caffeine for his book about naturally occurring drugs, he decided to give it up for three months. The process was not easy: “I was still not quite myself, and neither, quite, was the world,” he writes. “In this new normal, the world seemed duller to me. I seemed duller, too.”
But through his research and his experiences, Pollan came to a view of caffeine that acknowledged its downsides but also embraced its considerable benefits. He tells Rachel Humphreys (who has bravely gone nearly a day without a coffee at the time of the interview and is already feeling the effect) the remarkable story of how caffeine became the world’s dominant drug, and the only one which we have incorporated into day-to-day conventional life – one we hardly think of as a drug at all. With 90% of us taking it regularly, as Pollan notes, “For most of us, to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness.”
You can read Michael Pollan’s long read, The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?, here.
• This Is Your Mind on Plants: Opium-Caffeine-Mescaline by Michael Pollan is published by Allen Lane and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk
Photograph: Mathias Darmell/Getty Images/EyeEm
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