Chaired by Ben Brooker.

Following his New York Times bestselling How to Change Your Mind on the therapeutic value of psychedelics, Michael Pollan’s new book is This is Your Mind on Plants, a radical challenge to how we think about plants. Exploring the powerful attraction we have to psychoactive plants, Michael asks why they are subject to such paranoid and arbitrary regulation, and in wildly differing ways. Examining opium, mescaline and caffeine, he posits “societies condone the mindchanging plants that help uphold society’s rule and ban the ones that are seen to undermine it.”