Pollan’s book seems intended to get us thinking a little differently about plants and drugs and the effects of certain chemical compounds on us and in our lives. He divides the book up into 3 sections: the first deals with opium, the second, caffeine, and the third, mescaline. Am sure that like myself, many readers are familiar with the histories and discussions of the first two, but might know much less (in fact, I knew nothing at all) about mescaline. Pollan sections his book thus because he wants a representative of each of the three broad categories of psychoactive compounds, “A sedative, a stimulant, and a hallucinogen” (p4). He wants to make the reader rethink our norms and how we define what constitutes a drug and what does not, what is mind altering or otherwise altering, and also what is merely our societal and legal norms with regards to plants and chemical compounds.
The first part is about the legality of growing poppies and harvesting opium from the plants. It turns out the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) has very strict rules about the growing of poppies, but rules which are not strictly enforced for most part, and also little understood amongst the public. The agent Pollan speaks to says that while the DEA are not intending to go into “Grandma’s garden”,
“a gardener has to be growing P. somniferum with knowledge and intent before the deed became a crime” (p63).
However, it seems it is the DEA who determine what level of knowledge and intent counts as knowledge and intent. It is even more confusing because even if a compound is searched and there are no poppies growing or found, if the area if deemed large enough for poppy cultivation for the harvesting of opium, and if the search is based on other evidence, then this could be enough to convict a person. Moreover, the selling and buying of poppy seeds for growing, for gardeners, is still perfectly legal. These are, afterall, the same seeds on the popular bagels and muffins which are widely available and sold everywhere.
Pollan ponders on why poppies are rendered illegal, when other plants with even more toxicity and addictive substances (like tobacco and caffeine) are not. He also reflects on how the opium as a chemical compound, just happens to mimic chemical compounds manufactured in the brain, which is of course what makes opium in its many forms such an excellent painkiller. He wonders about the criminalization of opium, pointing out that other painkiller drugs are widely and legally sold, such as the OxyContin (launched by Purdue Pharma in 1996) as a opiate to treat pain. (incidentally, OxyContin, which made the Sackler family more than $35 billion dollars in profits, had spread public disinformation and led to more than 230,000 deaths by overdose, not to mention the casualties of addictions.) Pollan writes of how, as he learnt more and more about where the law stands on growing poppies, he grew increasingly paranoid about his own cultivation of poppies, and his making of poppy tea from his poppies for his own experimental consumption, and concluded that he was on the wrong side of the law.
Next in the book was the section on caffeine. Coffee beans, Pollan tells us, have to be given a lot of credit for persuading 2.5 million humans to tend it, and allot it 27 million acres of habitat. “The astounding success is owing to one of the cleverest evolutionary strategies ever chanced upon by a plant: the trick of producing a psychoactive compound that happens to fire the minds of one especially clever primate, inspiring that animal to heroic feats of industriousness, many of which ultimately redound to the benefit of the plant itself” (p157). Pollan makes claims that caffeine (in both coffee and tea) had a big part in creating civilisations and global trade and the industrial Revolution, and indeed Capitalism.
However, I wonder if Pollan is over-claiming a little, even given the significant historical role of coffee houses in art and politics, and the institutionalisation of coffee breaks. Moreover, he seems to base a lot of his arguments on his own self-experiment of going caffeine free for 3 months, breaking his own addiction, suffering withdrawal symptoms, and those consequent responses he experiences and records. He claims that without caffeine, he was even concerned with how to write his report, because he needs the caffeine to be focused and undistracted at work, and at writing. A few days after quitting caffeine, his withdrawal symptoms subside but he says in this new normal
the world seemed duller to me. I seemed duller, too […] I began to think of caffeine as an essential ingredient for the construction of an ego” (p96).
However, caffeine simply does not addict everyone in the same way nor produce the same responses when ingested, and so Pollan’s claims come across as slightly exaggerated. (Am sure there are many out there who never touch caffeine, but possess and exercise a big ego nevertheless.) That said, his observations on why and how plants produce the caffeine compound, how it affects bees, etc, are interesting. As a reader, I am just not entirely convinced caffeine, and esp coffee, is quite as consistently mind-altering as Pollan makes it out to be. Pollan useful cites the work of cognitive psychologists who distinguish between lantern consciousness and spotlight consciousness; the former illuminates a broader field of attention, and young children tend to exhibit this, where the mind is wandering, freely associating, making novel connections, creative. Spotlight consciousness, which is what caffeine promotes, is more
focused, linear, abstract, and efficient cognitive processing, more closely associated with mental work than with play” (p119).
The third substance the book addresses is mescaline is derived from cacti (particularly from San Pedro and peyotes), used for more than 6000 years by Native Americans in ceremonies. The effect, as reported by some:
“mescaline held the power to re-enchant a world from which the gods had departed” (p170).
It is said to return to us a sense of child like wonder at everything we see. Mescaline does not offer an escape from circumstance, but
“an expansion of it. Instead of an alternate reality, it promised infinitely more of this one” (p169)
Pollan struggles to find interviewees who will give him the information he seeks as many Native Americans familiar with this substance and its ceremonies, do not want to tell a non-Native American and a white person about it. They guard it as sacred (for ‘sacramental use’ and for community bonding) and also worry about supplies and misuse. One Native American even said she sees peyote as a spirit, not a thing, which is what non-Native Americans deem it. Pollan clearly understands their reluctance, as he flags it up repeatedly, but he seems to have pursued others for this knowledge even after having been gently rejected or dissuaded from continuing his research. He attempted more than once to be included in a ceremony where mescaline is taken, but was not able to secure an invitation. This section on mescaline makes for somewhat uncomfortable reading because it is difficult to reconcile how Pollan is showing respect for Native American users of peyote, when he disrespects their wishes by seeking to know about it, even when they do not want to divulge,
“I also encountered a deep reluctance on the part of many Natives to share – at least with this white person – exactly what goes on behind the teepee canvas” (p200).
One Native American even told him her message when she speaks about the topic, is “Leave peyote alone”, which makes it unambiguously clear what Pollan should understand this is also off limits to him. “This puts the eating of peyote by white people in a long line of nonmetaphorical takings from Native Americans. I was beginning to see that, for someone like me, the act of not ingesting peyote may be the more important one” (p208).
However, when someone makes Pollan a gift of 2 capsules of mescaline sulfate, he seems to find it acceptable to take these, probably because he is not consuming the peyote plant. Taking these capsules, Pollan felt his senses were
“admitting to awareness exponentially more of everything – more color, more outline, more texture, more light” (p219)
which was both awe inducing, and also potentially overwhelming;
“the world as it appeared on mescaline – that, for all its beauty, feels almost more than a mind can bear” (p218)
That said, Pollan does at the end get himself invited to a ceremony using Wachuma, a San Pedro cacti that also produces mescaline. The ceremony was conducted not by a Native American, but a Japanese American called Taloma (with a trace of Native American ancestry, according to family lore” and who “could be mistaken for Native American” in her looks (p225). Taloma apprenticed herself to elders of 2 lineages and began conducting ceremonies only after 20 years of apprenticeship. Nevertheless, she is not Native American and perhaps that is why she is more willing to divulge the ‘secrets’ of the ceremony and include non-Native American participants. Taloma is also the one who teaches Pollan how to cook and drink Wachuma – so much for not ingesting the cacti! The reader is not convinced these actions of Pollan would have been pleasing or respectful to Native Americans. At one point, Pollan himself says what he has done is cultural appropriation:
“For who were we but a bunch of gringos, most of us white Westerners doing their best to enact an ancient ceremony imported from the Andes. Were we guilty of cultural appropriation? You could say” (p240).
Overall, it is not exactly a riveting read, but it is an informational one at a basic level, providing readers with some background knowledge of these substances and their legal statutes, and giving the uninitiated reader a comparison between the effects. The writing is clear but flat. Mescaline seemed to intensify the experiences of the present and immediate, attuning one more acutely, even too acutely. Caffeine seemed to do something similar: coffee, for Pollan anyway, disperses the mental fog, makes the regular user feel “normal and transparent” (p92), aids and improves memory (this was tested on bees as well as humans), makes people more focused and efficient and energetic. And opium is said to “make sadness go away” (p77); Pollan’s experience was that it didn’t add anything new to his consciousness in the way marijuana can produce novel sensations;
“by comparison, the [poppy] tea seemed to subtract things: anxiety, melancholy, worry, grief […] a painkiller in every sense” (p77)
It did not take away Pollan’s ability to think clearly, as long as he thought of one thing at a time. He even felt energetic and purposeful.
Humans, animals, even insects, have been taking mind-altering substances and chemicals found in or produced by plants for a very long time, and it is far more normalised than most people realise, to be in a ‘drug-induced’ state, almost continuously. As Pollan conveys, we are always under a cocktail of chemically induced responses anyway, from those we produce within our own bodies, and those we ingest; it is nothing new or peculiar to have mind-altering chemicals in our bodies. But at different points in time and in different places in the world, these are regulated differently and assigned various social and cultural values.
This book is not without interest, but without meaning to be too harsh, it seems to me that the research on mescaline was rather imperialistically and high handedly approached, seeming to tread roughshod over the wishes of Native Americans and with a certain arrogance (as if research justifies all means), pursuing its own white/western/American agenda despite the many reservations and dissuasions from Native Americans, and is, by its own admission, guilty of cultural appropriation. The book’s readers are compromised by inadvertently supporting unethical research, so perhaps I will be more selective in the future about reading Pollan’s writings.
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