Co-presented by Vroman’s Bookstore, The Elliott Bay Book Company, Changing Hands Bookstores, and Boulder Bookstore hosted by Changing Hands Bookstores.

Michael Pollan will be joined in conversation by Rick Doblin, Ph.D.

In This Is Your Mind on Plants (Penguin Press) Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs–opium, caffeine, and mescaline–and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Michael Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively–as a drug, whether licit or illicit. . Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.

Michael Pollan is the author of eight books, including How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. He is also the author of the audiobook Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Made the Modern World. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan teaches writing at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his Master’s thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana vs. the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. Rick studied with Dr. Stanislav Grof and was among the first to be certified as a Holotropic Breathwork practitioner. His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist.

Event tickets include access to the event and a hardcover copy of This Is Your Mind On Plants.

Zoom links will be sent out via Eventbrite Email 48 hours before the event. Books will be sent after the event. A limited number of books will include a bookplate signed by Michael Pollan.

Ticket options include in-store pick up, shipped domestically (allow up to 3 weeks for delivery), or shipped internationally (allow 4-5 weeks for delivery). Books will be mailed to you shortly after the event, via USPS Media Mail. For those who choose in-store pick up, you will be contacted by Vroman’s via email shortly after the event and alerted as to when your book will be ready for pick up.

PLEASE NOTE: This is not a Vroman’s Live event, we have partnered with The Elliott Bay Book Company, Changing Hands Bookstores, and Boulder Bookstore for this virtual event to be held via Zoom Webinar hosted by Changing Hands Bookstores.