Michael Pollan’s 2018 bestseller How to Change Your Mind expounded on psychedelic drugs’ medical benefits and, in Pollan’s view, their unfair stigmatization. Now, Netflix has adapted his book into a four-part docuseries, hosted by Pollan, that is at times gripping and wholly convincing, and, at others, plays like a lame infomercial.
Each episode focuses on a separate psychedelic, beginning with LSD. Aside from discussing the drug’s possible medicinal uses, the first episode delves into the lives of key figures in the popularization of psychedelics, including LSD’s inventor Albert Hoffman, Aldous Huxley, and Timothy Leary, among others. There’s a lot of common knowledge here, with some notable exceptions—for instance: Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, had his miraculous epiphany to start AA while experiencing a primitive deliriant treatment, the belladonna cure.
The series gets progressively better with each episode, but the first is arguably the weakest. Pollan and his interviewees have a slightly creepy fanaticism about LSD and the perceived benefits of microdosing it. It’s a potent, unregulated, and illegal drug that has different effects on those who take it, but Pollan elides over its potential drawbacks in the same way a sunny, upbeat TV commercial for psychoactive medication will end with a speed-read laundry list of intense, harmful side effects. There’s a certain naiveté at points throughout the series, like when proselytizing for psychedelics turns into envisioning them as the solution to all of the world’s problems.
The second episode, about the hallucinogen psilocybin, is much more successful, not least of all because psilocybin is a relatively benign drug compared to LSD. Pollan speaks with experts on the subject, and people who have experienced relief from various disorders by ingesting psilocybin under clinical supervision. Pollan cogently explores points about its judicious use, and it seems to be enormously beneficial in the right circumstances with the right people. This episode lags when an interviewee describes his drug-induced trip at length, dragging on exhaustively. Further undercutting it is a sloppy, indifferent animated version of this trip. (For truly imaginative psychedelic animation, look to something like Yellow Submarine.)
Of the first three episodes, the third, about the medical benefits of MDMA (ecstasy), is the strongest. Pollan and his interviewees make a case for using MDMA in controlled, clinical settings to help defuse extreme cases of PTSD. Once the favored drug of ’90s ravers, MDMA appears to have life-changing potential. Wholly unlike the previous episode’s rambling digression, listening to trauma victims describe their experiences here is riveting, and testimonials about how the closely observed use of MDMA helped relieve their pain is touching and fascinating.
“How to Change Your Mind” makes many thought-provoking and intriguing points; the series is only middling because Pollan and his cadre of zealous experts oversell their case. They avoid discussing how wildly different individuals’ body chemistries are and how negatively many people react to even mild substances, let alone something as strong as LSD. Psychedelics are not one-size-fits-all, chemically speaking, and if Pollan had taken a more even-handed approach, “How to Change Your Mind” might have changed far more minds on these issues.
