Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 451

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "This Is Your Mind on Plants," by Michael Pollan.

All who try to construct a sturdy definition of drugs eventually run aground. Is chicken soup a drug? What about sugar? Artificial sweeteners? Chamomile tea? How about a placebo? If we define a drug simply as a substance we ingest that changes us in some way, whether in body or in mind (or both), then all those substances surely qualify. But shouldn’t we be able to distinguish foods from drugs? Faced with that very dilemma, the Food and Drug Administration punted, offering a circular definition of drugs as “articles other than food” that are recognized in the pharmacopoeia—that is, as drugs by the FDA. Not much help there. 

Things become only slightly clearer when the modifier “illicit” is added: an illicit drug is whatever a government decides it is. It can be no accident that these are almost exclusively the ones with the power to change consciousness. Or, perhaps I should say, 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.

Scientists recently discovered a handful of species that produce caffeine in their nectar, which is the last place you would expect a plant to serve up a poisonous beverage. These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us. 

Once humans discovered what caffeine and morphine and mescaline could do for them, the plants that produce the greatest amounts of these chemicals were the ones that prospered in the sunshine of our attention; we disseminated their genes around the world, vastly expanding their habitat and providing for their every need. By now our fates and the fates of these plants are complexly intertwined. What began as war has evolved into marriage.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman began, startling the journalist with both his candor and his cynicism. Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon White House “had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. . . . We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

So it seemed to me that I could remain safely on the sunny side of the law just as long as I didn’t attempt to extract any opium from my poppies. Yet I have to confess that this was a temptation I grappled with all last summer. You see, I’d become curious as to whether it was in fact possible, as I’d recently read, for a gardener of average skills to obtain a narcotic from a plant grown in this country from legally available seeds. To another gardener this will not seem odd, for we gardeners are like that: eager to try the improbable, to see if we can’t successfully grow an artichoke in Zone 5 or make echinacea tea from the roots of our purple coneflowers. Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as minor-league alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power. Also, one of the greatest satisfactions of gardening is the independence it can confer—from the greengrocer, the florist, the pharmacist, and, for some, the drug dealer. One does not have to go all the way “back to the land” to experience the satisfaction of providing for yourself off the grid of the national economy. So, yes, I was curious to know if I could make opium at home, especially if I could do so without making a single illicit purchase. It seemed to me that this would indeed represent a particularly impressive sort of alchemy.

Soon after the British East India Company began trading with China, cheap tea flooded England, rapidly displacing coffee as the nation’s preferred caffeine delivery system. A beverage that only the well-to-do could afford to drink in 1700 was by 1800 consumed by virtually everyone, from the society matron to the factory worker. To supply this demand required an imperialist enterprise of enormous scale and brutality, especially after the British decided it would be more profitable to turn India, its colony, into a tea producer, than to buy tea from the Chinese. This required first stealing the secrets of tea production from the Chinese (a mission accomplished by the renowned Scots botanist and plant explorer Robert Fortune, disguised as a Mandarin), seizing land from peasant farmers in Assam (where tea grew wild), and then forcing the farmers into servitude, picking tea leaves from dawn to dusk.* The introduction of tea to the West was all about exploitation—the extraction of surplus value from labor, not only in its production in India but in its consumption in England as well. 

In England, tea allowed the working class to endure long shifts, brutal working conditions, and more or less constant hunger; the caffeine helped quiet the hunger pangs, and the sugar in tea became a crucial source of calories. (From a strictly nutritional standpoint, workers would have been better off sticking with beer.) But in addition to helping capital extract more work from labor, the caffeine in tea helped create a new kind of worker, one better adapted to the rule of the Machine—demanding, dangerous, and incessant. It’s difficult to imagine an Industrial Revolution without it.

Here’s what’s uniquely insidious about caffeine: the drug is not only a leading cause of our sleep deprivation; it is also the principal tool we rely on to remedy the problem. Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes. Which means that caffeine is helping to hide from our awareness the very problem that caffeine creates. 

Climate change is already pushing coffee production higher up the mountain and making life difficult for farmers. Coffee plants are notoriously picky about rainfall, temperature, and sunlight, all of which are changing in Colombia, rendering lands that had always been good for coffee production no longer viable. Worldwide, the prospects for coffee production in a changing climate are, according to the agronomists, dismal. By one estimate, roughly half the world’s coffee-growing acreage—and an even greater proportion in Latin America—will be unable to support the plant by 2050, making coffee one of the crops most immediately endangered by climate change. Capitalism, having benefited enormously from its symbiotic relationship with coffee, now threatens to kill the golden goose.

Perched somewhat crookedly on the steep slope of one of these caffeine mountains, my main thought was, You really have to give this plant a lot of credit. In less than a thousand years it has managed to get itself from its evolutionary birthplace in Ethiopia all the way here to the mountains of South America and beyond, using our species as its vector. Consider all we’ve done on this plant’s behalf: allotted it more than 27 million acres of new habitat, assigned 25 million humans to carefully tend it, and bid up its price until it became one of the most precious crops on earth. 

This 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. For coffee and tea have not only benefited by gratifying human desire, as have so many other plants, but these two have also assisted in the construction of precisely the kind of civilization in which they could best thrive: a world ringed by global trade, driven by consumer capitalism, and dominated by a species that by now can barely get out of bed without their help. 

Of course, this all began strictly as an accident of history and biology—remember the goats that were said to have inspired that curious herder to taste his first coffee berry? But that’s how evolution works: nature’s most propitious accidents become evolutionary strategies for world domination. Who could have guessed that a secondary metabolite produced by plants to poison insects would also deliver an energizing bolt of pleasure to a human brain, and then turn out to alter that brain’s neurochemistry in a way that made those plants indispensable? 

The question arises: which party is getting the better of the symbiotic arrangement between Homo sapiens and these two great caffeine-producing plants? We probably lack the perspective needed to judge the question impartially, or to perceive how a plant we “use” might actually be using us. Big-brained and self-regarding primates that we are, we automatically assume we’ve been calling the shots with these two “domesticated” species, transporting and planting them where we choose, earning billions off them, and deploying them to gratify our needs and desires. We’re in charge, we tell ourselves. But isn’t that exactly what you would expect an addict to say? Sure you are. Bear in mind that caffeine has been known to produce delusions of power in the humans who consume it, and that this story of world-conquering success would read very differently had the plants themselves been able to write it.

Benally never used the term “cultural appropriation,” but it hung in the air between us. The background to his comments was a conflict that had recently erupted between the Native American Church and a new drug-policy reform movement called Decriminalize Nature. Almost overnight, this movement had persuaded municipal governments in several cities (including Oakland, Santa Cruz, and Ann Arbor) to order local law enforcement to treat the prosecution of crimes involving illicit plant medicines such as ayahuasca, psilocybin, and peyote as the lowest priority. Until the pandemic put everything on hold, the city councils of a half dozen other cities* were prepared to vote on Decrim Nature resolutions. 

The movement had single-handedly reframed the politics of drug-policy reform, beginning with the word “drug,” which it scrupulously refrains from using, along with “psychedelic,” another baggage-laden term. No, these were now “plant medicines,” or “entheogens”—a term for psychedelics meant to underscore their spiritual uses. (Entheogen means, roughly, “manifesting the god within.”) Decrim Nature has done a brilliant job of naturalizing psychedelics; in effect, reframing them as an age-old pillar of the human relationship with the natural world, a relationship in which the government simply has no legitimate role. There are now more than one hundred local chapters of Decrim Nature around the country. 

To those who believe adults should be able to use plant medicines without fear of the police, the early success of the movement seemed like unalloyed good news. But the Native American Church saw things differently. Worried that the decriminalization of peyote would fire demand, drawing fresh hordes of psychonauts to the peyote gardens, the Church requested that Decrim remove peyote from its list of approved plant medicines and images of the cactus from its website. 

This put Decrim in an exquisitely awkward spot. Its supporters are precisely the kind of people who deeply respect Indigenous cultures and regard themselves as woke on all questions of race, imperialism, and colonialism. Now they had run afoul of a group—Native Americans!—whose traditions and wisdom they not only revered but sought to emulate in their use of entheogens. Yet to exclude peyote from decriminalization, or limit access to it to one race and not another, would foul the beautiful simplicity of the movement’s message that there can be no such thing as a “criminal” plant. 

What to do? Hoping to mollify the Native Americans, Decrim agreed to stop talking about peyote specifically and refer instead to “mescaline-containing cacti.” (Even though peyote had been specified as one of the plants to “decriminalize” in the texts of the Oakland and Santa Cruz resolutions.) It did not take down images of peyote from its website, however, and published a statement on the site that only further antagonized the Indians: 

“It is therefore the position of the DN movement that the divine peyotl cactus does not belong to any one people, nation, tribe or religious institution. We consider it to be Mother Nature’s Gift to all of humanity, and we are firmly committed to awakening humankind to the spiritual insights and important messages that peyotl teaches to the human custodians of this planet we all share and live on.” 

“Decrim is a slap in the face of Indigenous people,” I was told by Dawn Davis, another member of the Native American Church. Davis is a Newe Shoshone-Bannock and lives on the reservation in the Ross Fork Creek District in Idaho; she is finishing her Ph.D. in natural resources at the University of Idaho. The natural resource she studies is the dwindling wild population of peyote. She worries that peyote could end up on the endangered species list, which could spell disaster* for peyotism and the religion it has spawned. She brought up Decrim during our Zoom call before I’d had a chance to ask her about it. 

“Now a person in Oakland has more rights to peyote than I do as a tribal member living on the reservation!” She was referring to the fact that, unlike the citizens of Oakland, Native Americans didn’t gain the right to cultivate peyote under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994; they also must prove their membership in a tribe and the Church in order to use peyote.

In this, white people like me have a role to play, Davis believes, which is why she accepts invitations to speak at psychedelic conferences. Her message: “Leave peyote alone. This is not what they want to hear. But I don’t believe this medicine is for everyone, or that it’s all about love and peace. They can synthesize all the mescaline they want, but please leave the wild populations alone.”* 

After speaking to Davis and Benally, I realized that calling the use of peyote by non-Native people an instance of cultural appropriation isn’t quite right. To appropriate an expression of culture—a practice or ritual, say—may or may not diminish it; the point can be argued either way. Yet the practice itself does not cease to exist by virtue of having been borrowed or copied. That is not the case with peyote today. Here, the appropriation is taking place in the finite realm of material things—a plant whose numbers are crashing. 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.