I have never done drugs with Michael Pollan, but I have done drug policy with him, and that's enough for me. |
In his cover story for Sunday Review, Michael looks at how "after a half century spent waging war on drugs, Americans seem ready to sue for peace." The question, of course, is what that peace will look like. |
Digging into the material with Michael left me with plenty of questions. A nice perk of my job is that I could just go ahead and ask him. |
AR: For many years you wrote primarily about food — potatoes and apples in "The Botany of Desire" and what you called our "national eating disorder" in "The Omnivore's Dilemma." As early as "Botany," you also wrote about tulips and marijuana, but lately you've been focusing more and more on consciousness, minds, drugs. How did you get from one to the other? Do you see it all as a part of a continuum or more as different aspects of the way consumption and existence interact? |
MP: I see the work on psychoactive plants and food plants as very much on a continuum — the continuum of our species' relationships with the plants that have evolved to gratify our desires. My subject as a writer has from the beginning been our engagement with the natural world, my own sense of which dawned in my garden (recounted in my first book, "Second Nature"). That interest will inevitably take you into food and farming, since eating represents our most vital engagement with nature. But food plants are not the only ones we ingest. Virtually every culture on earth also uses plants to change consciousness, a much less obvious and more curious human desire, that has also intrigued me, at least since "Botany of Desire" — actually since I saved a few pot seeds in my twenties and grew some really beat weed (as we said then) on my Manhattan windowsill. |
AR: A couple of years ago, you and I worked together on an essay you wrote arguing that cities and states might be moving too quickly, or at least not carefully enough, as they approved psychedelic mushrooms for therapeutic use. So I want to be careful here and ask how worried you are about seeming to be merely an advocate of drug use. What exactly are you saying and what are you not saying? |
MP: Speaking specifically, of psychedelics, it's becoming clear — thanks to a spate of recent research — that compounds like psilocybin and MDMA have enormous potential to help alleviate suffering and help us address the mental health crisis. But we need more research — and that I'm happy to advocate for, especially to get the federal government onboard in supporting psychedelic research. I also support efforts to decriminalize drugs and bring to a close a war on drugs that has not only failed in its objective but has done immense damage in the process, especially to people of color but also to our civil liberties. |
However, I don't advocate for outright legalization and commercialization. In the case of psychedelics, these substances are too powerful and psychologically risky to leave to the mercies of capitalism. Their use shouldn't be aggressively promoted the way cannabis now is in many states. The question then becomes, how do we fold them into society in such a way as to limit the risk and maximize the potential benefits? What sort of rules and regulations do we need to put in place? In order to explore this question, I have to stop being an advocate (since I don't yet know what to advocate for!) and resume being a journalist, pure and simple. |
AR: In your new book, "This Is Your Mind on Plants," you focus mainly on caffeine, mescaline and opium. Let's talk a little bit about border crossing, particularly with regard to consciousness. Is crossing these borders how we find out about being human — who we really are? |
MP: The fact that we can change consciousness (and there are many nonchemical ways to do so) suggests that there is more than one way to see the world and ourselves, which can be liberating to discover. If our consciousness is plural, that suggests that we potentially can cultivate some modes that maybe are either more interesting or more healthy than others. |
People talk of "ego consciousness," for example, which for most of us is very nearly "normal consciousness" — focused, goal-oriented, self-interested, acquisitive, perhaps a touch defensive. (Caffeine and cocaine tend to reinforce this particular mode.) To learn from either psychedelics or meditation that in fact you can safely let your ego go, or "soften" it, is liberating, and may explain the dramatic shifts in perspective people undergoing psychedelic therapy often report. |
For all drugs, the shift in consciousness (and sheer pleasure of the experience) can be productive — as it is for most of us with caffeine — or potentially destructive. Drug abuse is real, but it is only partly attributable to the molecule — which some, indeed most, people can manage to use safely. Others fall into patterns of use that can wreck their lives. To me, drug abuse implies a dysfunctional relationship with a psychoactive molecule, and that can happen with heroin or cocaine or nicotine and even with caffeine. |
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