The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

by Michael Pollan

Yet there are fifty million dogs in America today, only ten thousand wolves. So what does the dog know about getting along in this world that its wild ancestor doesn’t?

The identification of the apple with notions of health and wholesomeness turns out to be a modern invention, part of a public relations campaign dreamed up by the apple industry in the early 1900s to reposition a fruit that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had declared war on.

In the case of the apple, the fruit nearly always falls far from the tree.

In fact, the Bible never names “the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden,” and that part of the world is generally too hot for apples, but at least since the Middle Ages northern Europeans have assumed that the forbidden fruit was an apple. (Some scholars think it was a pomegranate.)

In nature, at least, the expense of beauty is usually paid for by sex.

Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal—unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of “manufacturing a controlled substance.” Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge.

Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo. The reasons for drawing the bright line here and not there generally make more sense within the culture itself, rooted as they are in its values and traditions, than they do outside it. But the reasons cultures give for promoting one plant and forbidding another are remarkably fluid in both time and space; one culture’s panacea is often another culture’s panapathogen (root of all evil); think of the traditional role of alcohol in the Christian West as compared to the Islamic East.

Cannabis in American culture has at various times held the power to foster violence (in the 1930s) and indolence (today): same molecule, opposite effect.

But doing so is not necessarily good for us. Ronald Siegel, the animal intoxication expert, has shown that animals who get high on plants tend to be more accident prone, more vulnerable to predators, and less likely to attend to their offspring. Intoxication is dangerous. But this only deepens the mystery: Why does the desire to alter consciousness remain powerful in the face of these perils? Or, put another way, why hasn’t this desire simply died out, a casualty of Darwinian competition: the survival of the soberest?

But what about the more powerful plants, the ones that do alter the experience of space and time in such a way as to take users out of everyday life—out of, even, themselves? Cultures tend to be more wary of these plants, and for good reason: they pose a threat to the smooth workings of the social order. This may be why most complex, modern, secular societies have seen fit to forbid them. Even the cultures that endorse these plants cloak them in elaborate rules and rituals as a way of containing or disciplining their powers. So what are these powers, and what commends them—not only to adventurous individuals in all societies but, in some cases, to their societies as well? For many cultures have held these plants to be sacred.

Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting—on a process, that is, of subtraction.

Even so, the use of drugs for spiritual purposes feels cheap and false. Perhaps it is our work ethic that is offended—you know, no pain, no gain.

Or maybe it is the provenance of the chemicals that troubles us, the fact that they come from outside. Especially in the Judeo-Christian West, we tend to define ourselves by the distance we’ve put between ourselves and nature, and we jealousy guard the borders between matter and spirit as proof of our ties to the angels. The notion that spirit might turn out in some sense to be matter (and plant matter, no less!) is a threat to our sense of separateness and godliness. Spiritual knowledge comes from above or within, but surely not from plants. Christians have a name for someone who believes otherwise: pagan.

The second story is simply this: In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal condemnation of witchcraft in which he specifically condemned the use of cannabis as an “antisacrament” in satanic worship.

The fact that witches and sorcerers were the first Europeans to exploit the psychoactive properties of cannabis probably sealed its fate in the West as a drug identified with feared outsiders and cultures conceived in opposition: pagans, Africans, hippies. The two stories fed each other and in turn the plant’s power: people who smoked cannabis were Other, and the cannabis they smoked threatened to let their Otherness loose in the land.

*Huxley suggests that the reason there aren’t nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past.