Fake Drug Guru & Serial Plagiarist Michael Pollan Uses Woman’s Writing to Bag His Latest Career
I wasn’t the first; I was just the most harmed.
Here’s the scene: famous white male food writer who has never had an original thought reads a woman’s original autobiographical story in Scientific American Mind about psychedelics as medicine, does a light rewrite — substituting interviews with white males for her personal accounts — and sells rewritten article to The New Yorker. Then he sells the pitch to Penguin, gets a Radcliffe Grant (because he has no access to libraries?) and re-invents himself as the go-to guru on psychedelics. Now he’s a professor at the once-radical, once credible, UC Berkeley Schoold of Journalism.
“Just the worst sort of plagiarism, taking someone else’s writings and knowledge, and then presenting yourself to the world as the brave white man explorer of this new world,” said Robert Whitaker, author of among other original books, the bestselling books Anatomy of an Epidemic and Mad in America.
Here’s the link to the original article I wrote about my own experience and the science behind it in 2013:
Hallucinogens Could Ease Existential Terror — Scientific American
Here’s the story of how I found out that he’d had plagiarized my work:
I had traveled from where I live now, in France, to Oakland California in 2017, to attend a big international conference about psychedelic science. The results of the clinical trial I’d taken part in where I’d been given psilocybin to treat my cancer related depression were being presented. It was the first clinical trial of its kind; and it was a big deal for all those involved.
I was in the conference venue lobby when I saw the the UK researcher who was running clinical trials at Imperial College, London, and who managed to get psilocybin taken seriously as medicine in the UK, Dr David Nutt. He’d initiated a depression study using psilocybin similar in design to the study I was part of at Johns Hopkins University, in the US.
“Congratulations about the book Erica. Great news!” he said, wrapping me in a bear hug.
“What book, David?” I said. “I haven’t sold the book. I haven’t even finished writing the proposal yet.”
“Random House! I just spoke with Michael. He just came over and introduced himself. He said he was working with you. Book’s due out next year, that’s great!”
“Michael who?”
“Michael, Michael Pollan!” said David.
“Are you kidding me?” I must have gone some shade of yellow or gray. “I haven’t submitted the proposal.”
“Are you okay?” said David.
“I need to sit down,” I said. I thought I was going to throw up, right there in the lobby of the Oakland Marriott City Center.
Then, as they say in the UK: the penny dropped.
“Oh my God,” said David.
“I need to sit down,” I said. We made our way to a sofa in the lobby. We sat down.
“Oh my God,” he repeated. “I said ‘you’re working with Erica,’ and he said yes.” He looked at me.
I’d never met the redoubtable Michael. I didn’t know redoubtable Michael. I could have cared less about the redoubtable Michael.
David and I sat and talked for the better part of an hour. He expressed outrage on my behalf. He said he’d get in touch with his agent and see if she could help me. He said it was a travesty. He said “This is terrible. Taking advantage of someone else’s work who isn’t yet famous because he can get away with it.” He remarked how often he’d seen it happen in academia, too.
Later, I ran into one of the researchers from New York University who is a friend, Dr Anthony Bossis. He said: “I take it you’ve run into Michael?”
I said: “No, but I’m sure I will at some point. I saw David. He told me.”
“Have you read his New Yorker article?”
I hadn’t.
“If you haven’t yet, then you probably shouldn’t,” said Anthony.
I’d spoken with the NYU researcher at length on several occasions. He’d offered to speak with me after my psilocybin sessions when I was in the clinical trial at Johns Hopkins. He said he’d be happy to speak with me when I was on my way back to London, if I liked. I took him up on the offer. I’d finished with my second psilocybin session, and I was having trouble with some aspects of my experience. I called him from the airport waiting for my plane in Baltimore, in 2012. We talked for close to two hours. It was June, and horrifically hot, and my flight’s departure had been delayed.
That afternoon, at the conference, while I was waiting in the main hall for the presentation by the Johns Hopkins researcher who would would present his published paper, the results of the study in which I’d been a participant, I saw the redoubtable Michael standing at the back of the auditorium. I walked up and introduced myself. Not recognizing my name, he shook my hand, grinning like a loon.
Then he saw my name tag. The grin vanished. His face went from red to pink to purple, to green, a sequence reminiscent of those colour-changing cephalopods in the Sea of Cortez. He made a kind of strange a quarter turn, like he wanted to get away. I half expected him to start gurgling. But I just stood there and asked him what he was up to now that he appeared no longer to be writing much for the paper I’d written for. I’d heard some gossip about his contract. I asked him about a food blog he wrote for. He got mad.
“I don’t write a blog,” he sneered, looking down his long nose. It doesn’t take a lot for a 6'3 tall guy to look down his nose at me. I’m about 5'2.
“Oh, but I read some of your blog,” I said chattily. I’ve never witnessed anyone trying to remove himself from my presence faster — including a guy I threw a drink at once. I realize now, four years on, I was not brave enough at the time to confront the redoubtable Michael directly. Or you could say: it’s taken a few years for my rage to mature.
Since then, I’ve experienced first hand what it really feels like to have my work co-opted — eighteen rejections later and counting.
I found out it feels a lot like rape (attempted, in my own experience — I was able to extract myself from that particular situation.)
The fact that the famous food writer was writing about hallucinogenic drugs at all is a function of the same machine that brought fame to him in the first place.
He was famous, so if he said he was an expert, that made him so — and like all self-styled gurus, people took him at his word. Just as planned.
The Dunning-Kruger effect has gone global.
When it comes to this person’s professional activity, I’m far from special. He’s plagiarized numerous food writers. I’ve spoken to some of them. One particularly poignant story is that of a young Australian academic nutritionist who made the mistake of sending the food writer his entire unpublished dissertation after he’d queried him based on a paper said nutritionist published in an academic journal. That very thesis, lightly rewritten —his signature literary disguise: rewrite lite, then regurgitate — became the famous food writer’s 2008 book: In Defense of Food.
Many are cowed by this writer’s reputation. The Australian academic certainly was. Some academics see plagiarism as a kind of twisted compliment. I guess if you think of rape as a compliment — a statement about your beauty? — then having your work plagiarized and co-opted is a compliment too especially if a famous guy does it to you. Wasn’t that Weinstein’s operational tactic? Until the women spoke up? And Woody Allen’s — only he finessed the technique by raping one of his own children and marrying another of them.
The same mass media machine that brought you Donald Trump created the famous food writer.
Here’s how it goes in publishing: the moment a topic becomes cool white men own it.
Here is a recent rejection my agent received from an imprint of the publishing house that published the redoubtable Michael’s last book:
Thank you so much for sending me Erica Rex’s proposal. This is a fascinating, emerging area of study, and I know there’s growing interest in this topic. But one of the big US books on this topic (HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND) was published by a sister imprint here at Penguin (Penguin Press), and I think it would be difficult for our same sales force to sell another book about this after that one. I’m sorry I can’t take the next steps here, but I appreciate the submission — thank you!
Here are a few sentences I wrote to my agent:
I have no doubt X’s next book will disinfect the field from anything serious. Men own this topic now because it’s ‘cool’. Women are not going to be central. Have you seen a serious book by a woman about psychedelics? Not on your life. Just have a look at Goop’s redoubtable list:
https://goop.com/wellness/health/books-on-psychedelics-and-consciousness/
What I’ve done in the past doesn’t matter. What awards I’ve won, or paper-of-record I’ve written for, or prestige I’ve earned in my own right none of these matter.
What I am not is an Anglo Saxon male who has never had an original idea in his life, who must plagiarize other people’s work to be successful, who went out and used a bunch of drugs illegally and now has resurrected his career by bragging about it.
White men using drugs and bragging about it appeals to publishers —using drugs, using alcohol, using women sexually. I can think of any number: Brett Easton Ellis, to name one. Any exploitable object will do, it seems. Their escapades are especially appealing when they can declare themselves shamans thereafter.
But wait…there’s a new development: the redoubtable Michael has been implicated in the death of an older person with an underlying heart condition. They obtained and ingested a dose of an illegal psychedelic drug on the famous food writer’s advice and died during the psychedelic session.
A member of the academic psychedelic research community has asked the food writer in writing for information related to this extreme adverse event in which he is implicated. As a matter of principle, researchers and any other persons who are party to such events are compelled to document the circumstances leading up to and including the adverse drug events. Even when no one dies. Ending up in a hospital qualifies. And yet…the famous food writer will not cooperate. He has not responded to the researcher.
Yeah, c’mon, it’s ridiculous to expect anything else.
§ Update: In the 15 March episode of Cover Story, a podcast about the ugly underbelly of psychedelic hysteria, titled “Who Am I Fooling,” the producers followed up with the family of the man who died because of what Michael’s book taught him, Richard Burton. As bad as it was, the story got worse: Richard Burton died during the session because of “probable acute psilocin cardiotoxicity due to the ingestion of psilocybe mushrooms” according to the coroner’s report. But after it was released, the report was suddenly…. changed. A doctor unrelated to the case or to Richard Burton himself, a self-identified psychedelic therapist who is the medical director for a group of boutique ketamine clinics poised to cash in on psychedelics the moment psilocybin becomes legal, called and pressured the coroner to change it. The report was rewritten it to say the cause was Richard Burton’s heart problem, and the mushrooms contributed.
I mean, responding to a query like that doesn’t do anything to burnish the food writer’s glory. It’s not like it’s an invitation to the Tonight Show, okay? It’s not even a subpoena. Why should he respond?
Even though my writing was the basis of the famous food writer’s new-found career path, I have to date been unable to place my book with a publisher. I’m not a man who has gone out and used a bunch of drugs illegally and now is bragging about it. I write about how psychedelics will change mental health. Here’s a link to another article I wrote about it:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-power-of-psychedelics/
and another:
I write about how psychiatry has to change; and how it has ruined women’s lives for 150 years and psychedelics stand to be a game changer for mental health that will benefit not only women, but everyone.
The story I tell is a story that has as yet gone unread because publishing is Monsanto. Eat, assimilate and destroy anything that is original and beautiful and thought-provoking. Turn it chemically into something that is profitable for WHITE MALES. Make sure you kill the weeds it sprang from…. Oh. Uh oh: some people are calling those endangered native plants now, are they? They’re like…THE INDIGENOUS? Oh my God! Kill ’em! Rout ’em! Yank ’em out of the ground! Extract that usable DNA, those volatile oils, their mitochondria, and then you have…Round-Up Ready books!
Spray ’em with that special industrial Round-Up, and voila! only Round-Up Ready books will go through the publishing mill! That’s the name of the game!
The redoubtable Michael is a famous writer because he’s Round-Up Ready for publishing. He’s an industrial operative. Spent the first part of his career pretending to be an advocate for real food — by plagiarizing actual real nutritionists and real food writers. Then he emerged: “Me-eat-real-food-me-big-man-important-writer.”
My original, scientifically informed, evidenced-based memoir-braided-with-science book about my experience in a ground-breaking clinical medicine trial, about mental health, about how psychedelic medicine was poised to bring about the end of gaslighting, toxic, self-serving psychoanalytically-based mental health treatment and behavioral psychology, and pharmaceutical-based non-cures for ordinary feelings; and about the theft of indigenous community based medicine; and women’s rights and being able to say what we’ve been trying to say all these years when we talk about trauma is yet unsold as of this writing.
Perhaps I was kidding myself.
What publishing will do is what they have done since they’ve become Monsanto: they’ll throw in a woman of color now and then, and a few Asian woman so they can claim they’re being inclusive. And if you’re not one of the lucky .001% who is part of their miniscule gesture?
Forget it.
You will be squashed, your ideas will be co-opted, and ground under the same cleated jackboot that annihilates rain forests, the indigenous, and women’s souls. It won’t stop any time soon. The guys who built the machine aren’t going to stop gunning the engine as long as it makes them money.§§
Psilocybin mushrooms are referred to as ‘the teacher’ by psychedelic practioners. Plant medicines, like psilocybin, ayahuasca, iboga are all teachers. They come from the natural world. One thing they do really well is teach people to accept their impermanence, and their limitations. Especially big egos: lots of big egos are humbled by psychedelic experiences. Kind of like having cancer. Ayahuasca, the real masters tell me, will really kick your butt into submission should you resist its lessons.
The redoubtable Michael missed a lesson or two in his Dionysian dalliances with all the mushrooms and psychedelic drugs a gourmand food writer could possibly devour. He was too busy gorging, evidently. How very end-empire decadent of him. How very Anglo Saxon male. Gluttony and debauchery defeats higher level thought every time. All that privilege does give a guy an appetite, I guess, for more of the same. Looks like for the time being, the publishing industry will keep feeding him. They’re a perfect folie à deux, the self-licking ice cream cone, the capitalist dream that just keeps on dripping until all the ice cream is gone. He’ll keep licking til the day he dies. I could keep going with this metaphor and the food writer’s sensationalist commercial vomit…well, there I went….
I’ll stop here.
This does not change one very important fact: writers like him —with their wide, voracious gaping maws and vacuous minds — will never be sated because he’ll never have anything to say. Talent and insight have eluded him. Others have something he envies, and he can’t seem to get his hands on it.
No matter whom he plagiarizes, no matter whom he pretends to be, he’s stuck with what he’s got: a high-paying niche producing long-form Kellog’s Rice Crispies box copy.
§§ Update: Michael doesn’t think much of women’s intelligence either. This observation came across my Twitter feed several weeks ago in response to Kara Swisher’s fawning promotion of Michael’s latest. The younger generation is way more savvy to covert misogyny than Kara, who should know better:
§§ — 2 Update 30 August 2023: Michael has such contempt for women, he doesn’t bother to note of the actual words written by his hero which put his idiotic and specious generalization to shame. I have lately been rereading Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. On page 33 of the Vintage Edition Huxley describes an old friend’s visit to a hospital to see his wife who is in the early stages of schizophrenia — then, as now, virtually untreatable.
“She (the wife) listened for a time, then cut him short. How could he bear to waste his time on a couple of absent children when all that really mattered, here and now, was the unspeakable beauty of the patterns he made, in this brown tweed jacket, every time he moved his arms?”
§§§ Update 31 December 2021: The true-yellow journalist has urinated his golden pièce de résistance. In recent tweets Michael tossed some nuggets to all aspiring psychedelic capitalists: psychedelic pharma stock tips! Pearls of wisdom about which psychedelic stocks to buy! If anyone else did this, it would be deemed a CONFLICT OF INTEREST and he’d be out of a job.
Several women journalists and a transgender male have been removed recently from professional roles for their personal tweets when they are deemed unsavoury to the power elite.
Here’s one example:
Here’s another: for pointing out the sexual assault record of a basketball star:
And another — for tweeting about Palestine:
And the only out transgender journalist at American Public Media’s flagship program, Marketplace, Lewis Wallace, was sacked for “publishing a post on my personal blog about being a transgender journalist exploring what it means to do truthful, ethical journalism with a moral compass in this very complex time.” This was 31 January 2017, a few days after the Trump inauguration.
https://medium.com/@lewispants/i-was-fired-from-my-journalism-job-ten-days-into-trump-c3bc014ce51d
Do you detect a pattern here?
If the same grueling skewed standards were being applied to Michael, he’d be out of a job at Berkeley. He’d be out of all of his lucrative engagements with Harvard and wherever else.
But no. Instead, Michael fulfills his mission to his favourite corporations and to his Silicon Valley Svengali, whipping the psychedelic circus into a frenzy. No better man for the job than professional journalism’s salute to its own mediocrity, the ne plus ultra of shills himself, the one and only Michael Pollan!
§§§§ Update 16 August, 2023: See my subsequent post about UC Berkeley School of Journalism’s response to my outing their prized feeder. They deleted my Twitter post — and then as a cover up, deleted Women’s History Month entirely from their timeline. Since it was Women’s History Month, and the Dean herself had a lot to say on Twitter about routing “extensive male violence and systemic sexism” I suggested they start at home, and posted a link to this essay. Since to do so would be too obvious and uncomely, the Dean did not block me on her timeline; but the school’s PR team blocked me on their Twitter feed. Journalism hates hearing THE TRUTH ABOUT ITSELF. It hates truth tellers. We’re like kryptonite.
