This Is Your Mind on Plants

Throughout Pollan’s work he explores how some plants and the drugs they produce come to be criminalized while others are permitted and even celebrated. This issue is particularly pertinent in his work on poppies and opium, which was published in the 1990s when the war on drugs was at its peak in the US. In this piece Pollan argues that law enforcement’s view of drugs, including the opium he was growing in his own garden’s poppies, was reductive and lacks understanding about different plants and drugs and how their properties may be used in constructive ways. Pollan argues that prohibiting drug use does not stop people from using drugs, writing, “Criminalizing drugs has done little to discourage their use or to lower rates of addiction and death from overdose” (17). Rather than view drug use as licit or illicit, Pollan claims that we should be focused on constructing healthy and beneficial relationships with different kinds of plants and drugs, whether from our gardens or the pharmacy.

According to Pollan, the US’s punitive approach to prohibiting drugs and punishing drug users is indicative of its “brutally simplistic narratives” about plants and drugs (5). He argues that other cultures, such as the ancient Greeks, were better able to comprehend “the two-faced nature of drugs” (5). They called them pharmakon, a word that could be interpreted as a medicine or a poison depending on the context. The author builds on this thought by pointing out that legal opiates, which tens of thousands of Americans have died overdosing on, can also be used constructively in medicine to make surgeries painless.

Beyond being ineffective and simplistic, Pollan also argues that the war on drugs is quite arbitrary in its categorization of acceptable and unacceptable drugs. For example, Pollan points out that only a century ago the US was gripped by an anti-alcohol movement that resulted in the legal prohibition of alcoholic drinks. Meanwhile drugs like opium were viewed as acceptable additives to popular tonics such as laudanum. Pollan ponders how his country’s relationship with drugs will change as our understanding of them broadens and our perceptions continue to shift. He writes, “Someday we may marvel at the power we’ve invested in these categories, which seems all out of proportion to their artifice […] After all, it wasn’t such a long time ago that the fortunes of the apple and the poppy in this country were reversed.”

Pollan adds nuance to his depiction of the war on drugs by acknowledging the special legal right of the Native American Church to use peyote, a cactus containing mescaline. He quotes interviews with Indigenous American leaders at length, allowing them space to offer detailed explanations of why peyote is so sacred in their culture and so effective as a healing medicine when used correctly in ceremonies. In doing so, Pollan quietly steers the reader toward sympathizing with the Indigenous American perspective and supporting their exclusive right to harvest and ingest peyote. The author does not shy away from documenting the controversy over the Decrim Nature movement, whose goal is to enable all adults to enjoy any plant-based medicine or psychedelic without fear of law enforcement. He claims that Native Americans asking Decrim Nature to not refer to peyote on their website “put Decrim in an exquisitely awkward spot” of wanting to honor their original vision but not disrespect Indigenous American wishes (203). Ultimately, Decrim Nature shared that they believed peyote to be “Mother Nature’s Gift to all of humanity,” directly contradicting Indigenous American beliefs that the Great Spirit intended it for Indigenous tribes. Pollan uses this controversy to show how government intervention in drug use is always consequential yet rarely predictable: In this case many Indigenous Americans have actively lobbied the government to criminalize non- Indigenous people’s harvest and consumption of peyote to preserve the plant.

Even in Pollan’s analysis of caffeine, the subject of criminalization creeps in. He reports that when coffee became more popular throughout the Arab world some people in power disapproved of the drink, and there were raucous debates over coffeehouses. However, because coffee was not mentioned in the Quran as a forbidden drink, it remained available, and government attempts to shut down coffee houses were unsuccessful in the long run (104). Pollan himself hints at the impressive effect a strong dose of caffeinated coffee can have on the human brain, humorously asking “Wow—this stuff is legal?” while trying coffee again after months of abstention (149). By including this mental aside, Pollan is reminding the reader of his overarching argument that the war on drugs is informed by changeable and sometimes arbitrary perceptions of drugs’ safety, purpose, and usefulness.