How to Change Your Mind Review 2022 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
The first episode is about LSD, which was first synthesized in 1938 by Albert Hofmann, working for Sandoz in Switzerland. Extensive research was done into the mind-expanding effects of the substance, where very little was needed in order to give a patient or research subject a profound effect. Pollan goes over the influential figures that made LSD widely accepted by the late ’60s, especially among Boomers, including Aldus Huxley, Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary.
After being banned starting in 1966, reaching a nationwide prohibition in the early ’70s, research into the uses and affects didn’t pick up again until the 2000s. Pollan not only talks to people doing research into the uses of LSD for people with illness, anxiety and depression, but he also talks with fellow author Ayelet Waldman, who found a new lease on her chaotic existence through microdosing.
If you are familiar with Pollan’s work, you either think he’s changed the way you purchase and consume food or you think that his analysis and advice is impractical for all but the people with the most disposable income and time on their hands. You may think the same things while watching How To Change Your Mind, which counts Pollan and filmmaker Alex Gibney among its executive producers. Not everyone can sit on a rock with a blanket around their shoulders, tripping balls in the name of journalism. Not everyone can treat their anxiety or depression by microdosing acid and then going to work.
But he does venture to make a point in this series, which is that psychedelics have been shown over time to be beneficial if used in a supervised way, which is not a whole heck of a lot different from other drugs that have been put under the “controlled substance” banner over the past half-century. We were cynical when we sat down to watch the first episode, as you might have noticed when we snarked off about the show’s disclaimer earlier in this review. But by the time the episode was over, he at least opened our minds a tiny bit to the possibility of expanding our consciousness through LSD and other psychedelics.
Pollan makes a pretty effective case, especially when he couches it in the idea of government overreach during its most intense “war on drugs” years. It’s not like their prohibition made LSD and other psychedelics harder to find for people who wanted them; it basically halted most of the research. Imagine where things would be if there was 50 more years of research to draw from. This is the message he’s trying to give viewers, and it’s an effective one, even if we have to watch him going on trips we don’t necessarily care to see.
