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Author Michael Pollan says in his new bestseller,
This Is Your Mind On Plants, that he voluntarily removed a section of his famous 1997
Harper’s article on growing opium poppies after a lawyer advised him to this effect, based on the U.S. government’s
1979 prosecution of
The Progressive.
If so, he appears to have gotten the lesson wrong.
Pollan’s ninth book explores humans’ relationship with the plants that produce opium, caffeine, and mescaline. The first section, about opium, is mostly a re-publication of Pollan’s 1997
Harper’s article, “Opium Made Easy,” which notes that ordinary garden poppies including
Papaver somniferum can be cultivated to produce a mildly narcotic tea. People who grow it with this purpose in mind are breaking the law. It’s literally the thought that counts.
Michael Pollan is a great writer, and This Is Your Mind on Plants is another in his series of great books. But his latest conveys a remarkably timid disposition toward tangling with the government over its objectively foolish policies.
“[W]hether or not the opium poppies in your garden are licit depends not on what you do, or even intend to do, but what you know about them,” Pollan writes. “[T]he more I learned about poppies, the guiltier my poppies became.”
There is one big difference between the article that ran nearly a quarter century ago in
Harper’s and the one that appears in Pollan’s book: The book contains several pages that were cut from the original piece. They are the pages that describe how Pollan brewed a tea with the poppies he’d grown and drank it, relating the experience for his readers. It’s an approach similar to those he would later take with cannabis in
The Botany of Desire (2001), various psychotropic drugs in
How to Change Your Mind (2018), and mescaline for
This Is Your Mind on Plants. (Pollan jokes in a footnote about how readers of his oeuvre might get a “chuckle” out of his self-identification in the 1997
Harper’s article as “a homeowner whose drug-taking days are behind him.”)
Pollan, throughout the article-turned-book-chapter, obsesses on his potential legal jeopardy in growing poppies while knowing full well that they had narcotic properties. He even has a nightmare about being raided, from which he wakes up in “bed clothes drenched with perspiration.” (Pollan, in setting up the reprint of his piece, allows that it now “feels overwrought in places.”)
But as absurd as it seems, Pollan’s concern was not unfounded. His
Harper’s article tells the story of a man whom he gets to know named Jim Hogshire, who faced felony charges for growing poppies. Hogshire had written a 1994 book,
Opium for the Masses, which tells people how easily they can grow poppies and cultivate the seed pods. One of the officers who raided his home and caused him to become homeless, is said to have told Hogshire, “With what you write, weren’t you expecting this?”
Michael Pollan is a great writer, and
This Is Your Mind on Plants is another in his series of great books. (And yes, I have read them all.) But his latest conveys a remarkably timid disposition toward tangling with the government over its objectively foolish policies. (While agents of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency were quietly threatening seed companies to stop selling opium poppies, the drug maker Perdue Pharma was peddling its legal drug OxyContin, which would
kill hundreds of thousands of people.)
Concerned about potential consequences, Pollan consulted a criminal defense lawyer whom he says regarded his article as “a bonfire of self-incrimination” and discouraged publication. He says John “Rick” MacArthur, the publisher of
Harper’s, responded indignantly, advising him to find a different lawyer.
MacArthur did this for him, hiring a noted First Amendment lawyer named Victor Kovner, who was eager to defend the magazine’s right to publish the piece. “I don’t recall [Kovner’s] exact words, but what I heard was:
This piece must be published for the good of the republic!” Pollan relates. “Together Kovner and MacArthur made me feel like my concerns—for my liberty! for my home!—were parochial when set against the public interest at stake.”
Kovner, Pollan says, considered it “unlikely that the government would come after a magazine as well-known and venerable as
Harper’s.” But, just to be sure, Pollan pressed MacArthur to draft “one of the most unusual contracts ever given to any writer by a publisher.”
Harper’s pledged to indemnify Pollan from any financial harm related to the story; pay any costs for his defense as well as pay him for any time he spent defending himself; pay a salary to his wife if he were to be incarcerated; and buy him a new home should his be seized.
But even this was not enough for Pollan. He asked Kovner “whether there was anything [else] I could do to protect myself.” He says the lawyer “suggested there were two passages in the piece that were most likely to antagonize the government, and if I could live without them, it might reduce the likelihood of prosecution.”
The Progressive magazine's "The H-Bomb Secret" issue from 1979.
“As I recall,” Pollan continued, Kovner “cited the
United States v. Progressive, Inc., a 1979 case in which the government had sought to stop
The Progressive magazine from publishing an article containing instructions for making a hydrogen bomb.”
Pollan’s synopsis is misleading, at best. The article by freelance writer Howard Morland did not provide instructions on how to build a H-bomb, a task which requires vast financial and technological resources; it disclosed a
key component of H-bomb design, as a way to expose the myths underlying the U.S. government’s regime of nuclear secrecy.
Extrapolating from
The Progressive’s example, Pollan writes: “By publishing a recipe for making poppy tea, and then describing its effects in generally positive terms, I would be seen as taunting the government as well as educating would-be opium growers.” Kovner advised that removing the pages that explained how he made the tea and sampled the result “minimized the risk, he felt, since the article would then, in effect, be serving the DEA’s purpose: intimidating people like me from divulging the recipe for poppy tea and describing its effects.” That last sentence is worth reading twice.
And so Pollan and
Harper’s agreed to cut this section, which he later recovered with difficulty from an old floppy disc; it appears for the first time in
This Is Your Mind on Plants.
Even shorn of its illuminating sojourn into illicit drug use, the article as published in the magazine’s April 1997 issue drew wide attention. I recall at the time receiving a press release about it from
Harper’s that included a packet of forbidden poppy seeds.
In the end, no one kicked in Pollan’s door or confiscated his home, which is a good thing. Whether Pollan’s acquiescence to the perceived wishes of the government is responsible for that remains an open question."
@Hip @lenora you may find this all interesting
