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

In this chapter, Pollan examines the evolutionary advantages of plants that alter our experience of reality. While most sweet plants are good to eat and bitter ones are not, there is another group entirely of bitter plants that intoxicate us. Pollan also notes that the word “intoxication” contains the word “toxic.” Among the more astounding capabilities of plants is their power to make complicated molecules, some of which are poisonous. This can be evolutionarily damaging, as it can meet with resistance in the population it is targeting. Animals were likely our guides to psychoactive substances; for example, goats, who became energized after eating coffee berries, were likely our conduit to coffee.

While modern gardens are grown mainly for aesthetics, ancient gardens were often grown as apothecaries that included psychoactive plants such as belladonna, hashish, and opium poppies. Pollan writes about how, in 1982, he decided to grow some marijuana, not out of interest in using the drug but because he, like many gardeners, wanted to regard himself like “small-time alchemists” (121). However, his tall pot plants almost got him into trouble with a local police chief in Connecticut, who was delivering wood to his house, though the police chief did not wind up seeing the plants. From 1982 to the time the book was written in 2001, the penalties for growing pot have become much harsher in many states, and many Americans were jailed for drug-related offenses. More people were arrested for marijuana offenses than for offenses related to any other drug, and cannabis had become the center of the drug war.

At the same time that a war was being waged against marijuana, the drug was becoming more potent than ever. The cultivation of the plant was centered in Amsterdam, where “coffee shops” (129) are licensed to sell it. Not only had gardeners become cleverer, the plant itself had morphed over the years. When the U.S. government asked the government of Mexico to spray its marijuana crop with pesticide in the 1970s, the marijuana industry became domestic. As the Cannabis sativa plant that flourishes in tropical places cannot withstand frost, domestic growers turned to growing Cannabis indica that thrive in colder climates and that produce a more potent high. Then, growers produced an American variety that was a hybrid of sativa and indica, making the American cannabis varieties the best in the world. The drug war meant that growers had to move indoors, where they manipulated the light, water, nutrients, carbon dioxide levels, heat, and genetics of the plant to produce sinsemilla with THC concentrations as high as 15% (THC is the psychoactive part of the plant), while normal levels were around 2-3%. Gardeners found ways to speed up growth rates and yields by providing vast amounts of nutrients, carbon dioxide, and light. Growers came to clone female plants (as males are useless in producing sinsemilla), producing identical plants that were referred to as “the Sea of Green” (136).

Pollan goes to Amsterdam to visit a modern pot farm. Pollan, looking at the identical, smelly plants subjected to strict regimens of light, says that they represent “ferocious Apollonian control in a garden ostensibly devoted to Dionysus” (137). Pollan believes the growth of these super plants is a reprise of tulipomania, but marijuana is not only grown for money but for pleasure and its ability to change human consciousness—which seems to be a universal drive. Different cultures have different standards about what is acceptable (for example, alcohol) and what is taboo.

Pollan wonders why it is evolutionarily beneficial for people to ingest psychoactive substances. Steven Pinker proposes the theory that the human brain has two capabilities (among others)—the ability to solve problems and the ability to produce internal chemical rewards that wash the brain and make us feel good. The first system has figured out an artificial way to bring about the second system. Because animals that use intoxicants are more prone to accidents and to not taking care of their young, it seems like evolution should reward what Pollan calls “the survival of the soberest” (142). Pollan deduces that psychoactive substances can be an advantage in certain ways. For example, they can help reduce pain, increase concentration, increase endurance, decrease inhibitions, and relieve stress. Therefore, those who use them might be better able to deal with the tribulations of everyday life.

The appeal of "transparent" (142) drugs (those, such as coffee, that people can use and still perform their daily tasks) is apparent, but what about those that alter consciousness more noticeably? Many of these substances, including plants and fungi, have enabled people to consider spirituality and were part of the founding of religions. They are, in Pollan’s words, “bridges between the worlds of matter and spirit” (144). The opium poppy and cannabis have also inspired the imagination. For example, many Romantic used these substances, as did the great thinkers of ancient Greece, who participated in a ritual called the “Mysteries of Eleusis” during which they consumed hallucinogens (probably ergot, which comes from a fungus).

Pollan believes that psychoactive plants might play a role as a kind of “cultural mutagen” (149), to foster new ways of looking at life. Pollan actually produced this idea while high on pot—as he tried the Amsterdam strains bred for creating certain mental effects. He believes that the illegal nature of pot can in itself lead people to feeling paranoid while using it. He traces the discovery of THC by an Israeli neuroscientist named Raphael Mechoulam and the discovery of cannabinoid receptors in the brain by Allyn Howlett at St. Louis University Medical School. The brain’s own endogenous cannabinoid was named “anandamide,” the Sanskrit word for “inner bliss” (154). The cannabinoid network, which is still under investigation, seems to affect other neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, and it might help us get through (and later forget about) painful experiences, including childbirth.

What is the evolutionary purpose of cannabis producing THC? It protects the plant from ultraviolet light, has antibiotic properties, and provides a defense against pests. The THC also serves to make the plant attractive to humans and to help its dissemination around the world. The plants that produced the greatest THC had the greatest number of offspring. Its co-evolution with humans is marked by two paths—the growth of hemp and the growth of cannabis plants for medicinal and psychoactive purposes.

Pollan tries to figure out what happens to a person when he or she is “high.” Allyn Howlett’s term to describe being high is “cognitive dysfunction” (158). Cannabis creates short-term memory loss, as do the cannabinoids in our own body. Forgetting, rather than being a curse, can help us in certain situations, as our consciousness receives so much information. THC is just far more powerful than the brain’s endogenous cannabinoids. Pollan believes that by enabling us to forget the minute-by-minute sensory input, THC can give us the sense of forgetting time and living in the moment. The philosopher Nietzsche also extolled the virtues of forgetting, or being caught up in the moment, as necessary to human happiness. We often can’t concentrate on what it feels like to exist in the moment, but cannabis can affect the consciousness so that it intensifies the senses. By letting go of the usual baggage, we have a kind of “innocence to our perceptions of the world” (168). Aldous Huxley referred to the power of peyote as disabling “the reducing valve” (169)of consciousness. With drugs, the reducing valve is opened to let more of consciousness enter it. Pollan wrestles whether this experience is false, but Aldous Huxley argued that mystics can also bring about a transcendent state of consciousness by fasting or chanting.

Myths have long followed cannabis, including the story Marco Polo brought back from the Orient that Persian Assassins used hashish to make them more ferocious (in actuality, the Assassins took hashish as an initiation rite). This story was used to criminalize cannabis in the U.S. Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 issued a condemnation of cannabis, which he claimed was used in the “Black Mass” instead of wine. Capitalism and the church ask people to gain their sights on the future and therefore detest cannabis, which suspends time. Adam and Eve’s forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was the knowledge that their spiritual guidance could come from a fruit—but religion wanted them to look to the heavens for this inspiration. Pollan notes about his own garden that the sacraments we taken therein are bound to the earth. Using leaves or flowers to alter our consciousness is, Pollan believes, a “check on our hubris” (178), challenging the Judeo-Christian idea that our minds are separate from nature. Instead, the very same chemicals in cannabis may also be in our brains, showing our deep connection to nature.