This is Your Mind on Plants
Michael Pollan (Penguin Books, 2021)
“The drug war’s simplistic account of what drugs do and are, as well as its insistence on lumping them all together under a single meaningless rubric, has for too long prevented us from thinking clearly about the meaning and potential of these very different substances. The legal status of this or that molecule is one of the least interesting thing about it.” Michael Pollan gives us a book in three essays about psychoactive substances, and our biological, social, historical, and legal relationships with them.
The first essay is about opium. I clearly remember reading the original in Harper’s Magazine, more than 25 years ago. I’m glad to see it again, in a more complete form; in the1997 publication, Pollan censored his account of actually trying a tea made from the pods. The essay is partly about the determination of the US Drug Enforcement Agency to prevent citizens from discovering how easy it would be to obtain household supplies of opioids; in fact, the flowering plants found in our gardens are not botanically different from the dreaded opium poppies of Afghanistan and Turkey.
It’s also about Pollan’s awareness of the DEA, and the potentially serious consequences that could have befallen him. Those hinged on some constitutionally and philosophically knotty questions. How would the DEA determine that he had ‘knowingly’ or ‘intentionally’ planted the flowers to use them as drugs? Of course, confessing in a nationally published magazine might be considered something of a dead giveaway; but by now, the statute has run. As it turns out, of course, the opiates that were really destroying American lives were the pharmaceutically enhanced plagues of OxyContin and its ilk.
The third essay concerns other mind-altering substances: those derived from cactus plants, such as peyote and mescaline. Pollan’s quest for information and experience was seriously disrupted by the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. It’s not impossible to use psychedelics alone, but the story he was after had more to do with the way indigenous people use them, at the intersection of religion and psychology. There’s politics, too; should the use of peyote be restricted to religious observances, and hence to indigenous people? Can white people use it without wrecking it, ecologically or socially?
The middle essay is not about use of a drug, but about abstention: caffeine is one of the most widely used psychoactive materials, though one of the latest to come along. Coffee and tea reached London in the 1650s. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the arrival of caffeine in Europe changed...everything.” However hyperbolic that sounds, Pollan makes his case: “Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.”
This was the chapter in which I took the most interest, since I’m as implicated as the 90% of adults who use at least some caffeine; we always know when the next dose is due, and where we’re going to get it. How much of my brain power is owed to the magic stuff, and what would happen if the sleep deficit ever came due?
Be that as it may, it’s always a pleasure to linger with Michael Pollan over a cup of tea, both for the sharp writing and for the wide-ranging view.
Any Good Books, November 2024
Posts
