Very few books require a legal disclaimer, but Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants includes a lengthy legal warning on its copyright page. Among other things, readers are warned that “this book relates the author’s investigative reporting on, and experimentation with, the opium poppy plant…and mescaline. It is a criminal offense in the United States and many other countries…to manufacture, possess, or supply…” these plants in any form with few exceptions. The exceptions include government-sanctioned research, medical prescription, and “in the case of peyote…as permitted by the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments.” The publishers assert that the book is not “intended to encourage you to break the law and no attempt should be made to use these plants or substances for any purpose except in a legally” sanctioned way. But, if you grow poppies in your home garden, and want to continue to grow them without fear that your personal F.B.I. agent will come knocking on your front door to raid your ornamental garden, you might want to do yourself a favor and stop reading this article now. While in our heavily-litigated society, I often take such warnings in measure, the warning in this case may not be entirely without merit.
Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants is composed of three longer essays. In simple terms, one is about the opium that can be found in decorative poppies, the second is about addiction and coffee, and the last is about mescaline and its religious uses among native Americans and its appropriation by White people. Each essay is fascinating in its way, but the most beautifully crafted one is Pollan’s reprint and expansion of the article he wrote for Harper’s Magazine. In the essay, Pollan explores the simple and common poppy growing in many American gardens. When Pollan wrote the essay in 1997, the government seemed committed to a campaign to make Americans believe that the poppies growing on their front lawns were somehow different than the poppies growing in Afghanistan for opium. They weren’t. Poppies contain opium, and the boundary between their legality and illegality in America comes down to epistemology—namely, whether a person growing the poppy knows it contains opium and whether the person intends to extract opium from the poppy. Whether the person has actually performed the extraction, or just knows how to do it, seems to be a matter of legal discretion on the part of prosecutors. Pollan writes about a legal case where a person was arrested and his assets seized based on the fact that he had written about how to perform an extraction. The fact that he happened to have poppies on his property was used as damning evidence. Of course the potential for corruption, civil rights violations, racial profiling, and the like are immense given a law so seemingly vague.
In his 1997 Harper’s essay, Pollan omitted whole pages he had written. In these pages he tells how one might make a mildly narcotic tea from one’s own poppies. In This is Your Mind on Plants, Pollan doesn’t omit anything. He also writes about a deeper sadder irony. While the D.E.A. was threatening ornamental poppy growers with arrest, (and actually arresting at least one), big pharmaceutical companies were promoting their opioids across America, a campaign which would lead to a very real and devastating opium crisis in America. A writer censored himself for fear of getting his assets seized for merely writing about the opium in ornamental poppies, while big pharmaceutical companies down the road were actually producing drugs based on that same opium, that would lead to death, addiction, and real harm. The man arrested for his ornamental poppy “operation” ended up losing everything, ultimately living in the street. The fact that a victim of the American war on drugs appears, on the surface, indistinguishable from a victim of the opioid epidemic is telling.
The American war on drugs has always be been arbitrary in nature. Crack cocaine (which was more commonly used by Black individuals) is a drug for which one could face heavy jail time, while cocaine (which was more commonly used by White individuals) has typically garnered shorter sentences and less-damaging penalties. One drug dealer gets life in jail, while another becomes rich because she works for a pharmaceutical company. The regulation of controlled substances is one of the more unfortunate infringements on personal liberties currently taking place in America. (I qualify my statement only because laws against abortion in the American south are far worse.)
Hamilton Morris, the creator of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, a brilliant and entertaining documentary series on Vice, often makes the point that plants shouldn’t be illegal. Incidentally Hamilton’s Pharmacopiea makes for excellent companion viewing while reading Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants. Hamilton Morris (the son of Errol Morris) travels the world to try various mind-altering substances and engage with the cultures that find them sacred. Each episode is a brilliant self-contained documentary in itself, and it’s a delight to see the next generation of filmmakers forging contuining traditions of excellence.
Pollan (and many native elders) argue that White people should avoid using peyote (largely because it is increasingly rare to find in the wild and because many native elders believe White use is cultural appropriation), but Hamilton Morris speaks to a native elder who believes that those narratives stem from the laws of White men attempting to tell native people what they can and cannot do. I found it noteworthy that Hamilton didn’t consume wild-grown peyote, and that there is a strong case for White people making the conservationist decision to avoid eating wild-grown peyote, due to its rarity and to preserve its use for Native Americans. As far as farm-grown peyote goes, native elders should obviously be able to give it to whomever they want to give it to, and perform their ceremonies for whomever they choose.
Michael Pollan, like Morris, seems to be among a growing number of Americans that believe that the American drug war “with its brutally simplistic narratives” serve less to protect Americans and serves as a tool to promote the incarceration of Black, brown, and Indigenous bodies. The American drug war, even when observed from the most charitable of readings, is at best a mechanism of control intended to keep people working and consuming in our late capitalist system.
Pollan writes that these laws are arbitrary at best, and deem illegal the drugs with “the power to change consciousness in ways that run counter to the smooth operations of society and the interests of the powers that be. As an example, coffee and tea, which have amply demonstrated their value to capitalism in many ways, not least by making us more efficient workers, are in no danger of prohibition, while psychedelics—which are no more toxic than caffeine and considerably less addictive—have been regarded, at least in the West since the mid-1960s, as a threat to social norms and institutions.”
We live in a culture where we have been divorced from the natural world. We don’t grow our own food and often don’t even know where our food has been grown. Engagement with nature is often relegated to a weekend excursion in the woods at best. Nature is recreation, not where we live and find transcendence. Pollan writes: “I’ve come to appreciate that when we take these plants into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways possible.”
For generations, psychoactive drugs have been used as medicines to heal, and new research reveals that they have immense potential to help alleviate anxiety at the end of life, help people who are depressed, and even help those who are addicted to alcohol and other substances. “A pharmakon can be either a medicine or a poison; it all depends—on use, dose, intention, and set and setting. (The word has a third meaning as well, one often relied on during the drug way: a pharmakon is also a scapegoat, something for a group to blame its problems on.)”
Pollan doesn’t write his essays to deny the existence of addiction. He openly admits to having an unhealthy relationship with coffee, and there are certainly people for whom use of psychadelics can be incredibly damaging (individuals with family history of psychosis or serious mental illness are one such group). Pollan’s essay on the poppy plant doesn’t detract from the terribly damaging effects of opium on individuals and society. Pollan explores the multiplicity of relationships that humans can have with mind-altering plants, sometimes abusive, sometimes healing, and sometimes transcendent and religious. For the government to deem all uses save just a few limited cases abusive feels perverse.
William Shakespeare was also keenly aware of the ways in which people could abuse all things, not just drugs, but love, and hate. In Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence walks through his herb garden where various medicines and poisons grow—the ones that can put our protagonists to sleep in small doses, but in larger doses, kill them.
Friar Lawrence says:
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good but strain’d from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometimes by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power.
Is Lawrence to blame for the death of Romeo and Juliet? Is love? Is hate? Shakespeare would argue none of these, but rather all of them, but only when they are “straind from that fair use…stumbling on abuse.”So, too with plants. So too, with anything in this life.
Buy Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants from Bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Buy Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants from Amazon.com (affiliate link)
Stream Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia on Amazon.com (affiliate link)
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.