Human beings clearly love drugs.
They’re everywhere,
from alcohol to psychedelic toad venom
Every culture in human history
has looked for ways to alter its consciousness.
So why are some drugs legal, and some drugs illegal?
Why do our policies around drugs seem to make no sense at all?
I’m JS Rafaeli
I’ve spent years writing about drugs,
why people take them,
and why our governments chose to declare war on them.
At VICE, we make a lot of films about drugs.
But in this show, I get to dig a bit deeper,
I get to talk to fellow expert drug nerds
about their research into the crazy world of mind-altering substances.
[News on Drugs]
Michael Pollan is a writer who’s spent 30 years
looking at humankind’s relationship with plants—
how we shape their evolution and how they shaped ours.
Today, we’re going to talk about why some plants are legal,
why some plants are illegal,
and why we should think about our morning cup of coffee
like we think about taking opium or mescaline.
In his new book,
Pollan looks at three essential plant-based drugs:
Caffeine, Mescaline and Opium,
which have fundamentally shaped human history and society.
Michael, it's a real pleasure to have you on the show.
What’s your interest in the relationship between plants
and the human mind?
I wrote
because I wanted to explore this really curious fact about our species
which is that all people, everywhere,
have a universal desire to change consciousness.
And in most cultures, 99% of them have found a plant
that helps them do it.
What is that about? Why are- What is it good for?
Why do we have this desire?
I’ve been writing about the relationship of plants and people
since I started gardening.
I wrote a book called
which really looked at the symbiotic relationships
between plants and people,
when I recognize that not only do we change them
through domestication and giving them new habitat and breeding,
they change us too.
I came to see that plants have a lot of agency.
They have their own agenda.
Sometimes it coincides with us, sometimes it doesn’t.
And that’s what started me on this journey. Looking at,
Opium, Mescaline and Caffeine.
So where caffeine is a drug that has transformed all of global society
mescaline seems much more specific to one particular culture.
And I’d like to talk a little bit about
the Native American peyote religion
and how that developed
and the role that it plays within that society.
So there are these two classes of cactus that produce mescaline,
that we know of,
one is peyote, the other is San Pedro.
What kind of cactuses are those behind you?
Oh, interesting ones.
It looks like baby San Pedros.
It’s a very interesting substance.
Mescaline isn’t a psychedelic.
It’s an alkaloid.
It comes from some cactus, two kinds of cactus:
San Pedro, which grows in South America,
and peyote,
which grows in a region around the Rio Grande River on both sides,
in Mexico and southern Texas.
And it, in some ways, is like other psychedelics,
but in others, it’s really distinct.
There’s not a lot of hallucination.
It's very much a here and now drug.
It immerses you in your place, your moment
more deeply than you ever have before.
At least, that was my impression.
And you can spend an hour looking at a bowl of apricots
or a flower in a vase or out of a window
and see more than you’ve ever seen.
It is as if the doors of perception have been cleansed or opened wide.
Reality is richer than we know,
and you get an inkling of that on mescaline.
You feel, you see nuances of color you’ve never noticed before.
I mean, just the texture of the world is just ultimately richer
and more fascinating than you thought.
It’s indigenous people that were using psychedelics
thousands of years ago.
Peyote was used at least 6,000 years ago.
And we are learning something they already knew,
these are the native people, especially in the new world,
which was that these changes of consciousness
could put you in touch with the divine,
but they were also powerful healing tools.
And so I wanted to look at the indigenous use of a psychedelic,
and specifically the Native American church.
In North America,
Native Americans have the legal right to use peyote,
and they use it in a ceremony
that has proven to be incredibly helpful in healing their traumas.
And this is a very traumatized people.
I don’t know if people realise just how bad it got in America
in the late 19th century for Native Americans.
It was official US government policy to destroy their culture.
Their ceremonies were banned.
Children were removed from their parents.
They had their hair cut,
and their hair is symbolically very, very important.
It was at this moment that they discovered or really rediscovered
the power, the healing power of peyote.
So I think we have a lot to learn from them.
I’m not saying we need to imitate their ceremonies.
I don't think it's appropriate to our culture.
But there's some underlying principles that are really important.
I mean, for example, they never use a drug, a psychedelic casually.
It's always with intention. There's some purpose.
They do it only on special occasions.
There’s always an elder involved,
you know, someone who knows the territory,
and it’s always surrounded by ritual.
I think that's really important.
I think people who use drugs in a ritual way
rather than casually or wantonly
are not the people who get in trouble with drugs.
I think one of the most interesting words that you just used there
is elder, right?
Because we are presented,
so often we’re kind of sold a vision of “drugs”
where it’s something that young people go off and do,
and old people go kind of like, “No, no, no, you shouldn’t do that.”
Whereas in the Native American ritual,
it’s actually something that sort of brings generations together,
and it’s like a force for cohesion in society
rather than tearing it apart.
I was very interested in that because when psychedelics came to the West,
they arrived in the 50s and 60s in Europe and the United States,
and they were these powerful substances,
there was no instruction manual.
Nobody said, you know, “This is how you use them.”
So we just tried a lot of different things, some of which were crazy.
We put LSD in the punch bowl.
The CIA dosed people without their permission
just to see what would happen.
People took psychedelics under really suboptimal conditions,
and there were people who crashed and burned as a result.
We use them very often recklessly.
But here were Native Americans,
for whom it was a very conservative force.
It was a way to weave young people into society.
You would have rites of passage that involved peyote,
It was a very socially cohesive ceremony.
It tells us there may be another way
to construct psychedelics in our society.
And I think we’re moving there.
This whole move towards psychedelic therapy,
the identity of psychedelics
is shifting from being a disruptive force
to being a tool that may help our society
deal with a mental health crisis.
There is a movement in America now called Decriminalize Nature,
which seeks to legalize all plant medicines.
They don’t include opium among the plant medicines.
And that's because opium,
it would have been hard to pass
because opium is regarded as so evil right now.
That points to the fact that drugs are complicated.
You know, the same drug can be a blessing or a curse
depending on the context in which it’s used.
And opium currently is a curse.
But we need to remember that even it is a blessing to many people
if you’ve ever had surgery or even serious dental work.
And for people near death, it’s a blessing.
And in the new book, let’s take caffeine.
The big headline here is that we're all basically drug addicts, right?
Ninety percent of us have a daily relationship with caffeine.
And most of those people are, I would say, dependent on it.
And if you want to check and see whether that is you,
skip it for a day and see how you feel.
The thought fills me with horror.
You actually did that, though, to write this section of the book.
You went cold turkey. How was that for you?
Oh, it sucked.
It was terrible.
So I went three months without caffeine.
I went cold turkey.
Initially, I felt like I had acquired attention deficit disorder.
I mean, I just could not focus on anything.
I was very easily--
Anything could distract me in the field of my attention.
I also felt like a veil had dropped between me and reality
that I was-- It was just not so transparent.
There was a fog, and that persisted for at least a week.
After a week or so,
I began to be able to focus enough to get a little bit of writing done.
I don’t think it was very good.
But for the entire three months, I felt as if I wasn’t myself.
And that’s quite remarkable
to realize that “myself” depends on this plant,
and that what I thought of as my normal, ordinary consciousness
was, in fact, caffeinated consciousness.
Speaking of which, I’m getting my...
my daily--
You just got visited by your drug dealer.
I did. I did. My wife, she prepared the coffee.
So what are the particular effects on consciousness
that caffeine is imposing on us?
What are we looking for from it?
Well, caffeine does a lot for us. It does make us more alert.
It gets in the way of the chemical that increases our sleep pressure.
Over the course of the day, there’s this chemical,
it’s called a neuromodulator called adenosine,
and it builds up, levels build up in your brain
till eventually you’re tired, and you go to sleep.
Caffeine fits into the exact same receptor
and gets in the way,
so the adenosine never gets to hook into the receptor.
Therefore, you never feel it.
It’s still circulating in your brain, but it’s not registering,
and you get this kind of rebound tiredness.
And what will you do then?
You’ll probably have another cup of coffee.
You know, coffee proposes itself
as the solution to the problem that coffee creates.
It's kind of a brilliant molecule, caffeine.
But there are other things going on
that can’t be explained simply through this adenosine receptor,
and that is the fact that it also helps our focus.
Psychologists talk of two kinds of focus.
There’s spotlight consciousness,
which allows us to block everything out,
focus on our work, get a lot of stuff done.
And it’s really valuable to our species and to civilization.
And then there is something else called lantern consciousness,
where you’re not focused so much,
but you’re taking in information from all over, from all your senses.
Caffeine increases spotlight consciousness,
and that’s why it’s such a good work drug.
Even bees who receive caffeine from certain plants that they pollinate,
specifically citrus, the citrus family,
they will remember where they got that caffeine
and return to it, very predictably.
And it’s one of the ways those flowers manipulate the bees.
Give them a little shot of caffeine,
and they remember, and they come back,
and they’re more what they call faithful pollinators.
Picking up on the work and manipulation theme,
in terms of society,
coffee is introduced to Europe
at sort of precisely the moment that capitalism is invented,
almost the same set of decades.
And these two events are perhaps not coincidental.
No, I don’t think they are at all.
I think caffeine really sped capitalism,
helped capitalism rise.
It’s not the only thing that was happening, obviously,
but I think it was critical.
Unlike other drugs,
most other big drugs like alcohol or opiates or cannabis,
which have been around for thousands of years,
and we don’t really have a record
of what the world was like before they came in,
since caffeine comes in so late,
we have a real sense of before and after.
And so caffeine comes along
and is clearly implicated in the rise of the age of reason
and scientific revolutions of the 17th, 18th centuries,
the Enlightenment, and the rise of capitalism.
The best proof I know
for the idea that caffeine is a great tool for capitalism
is the institution of the coffee break.
I guess you have a tea break in England,
but in America, twice a day, your employer gives you a free drug
and then gives you paid time in which to ingest it,
the coffee break— 20 minutes at ten o’clock,
20 minutes at 4:00 pm.
Why would they do that? Why would your employer do that?
They do that because it makes you a better worker.
Just when you’re flagging in the day, you get this boost,
and efficiency goes up and quality of work goes up.
And so it’s definitely served capitalism,
it’s hard to imagine it without caffeine.
OK, and so that brings us to the third plant that you talk about,
which is opium or the opium poppy,
which also occupies this weird space of being sometimes legal
and sometimes not legal.
And I know you kind of have some personal experience of that as well.
So Papaver somniferum,
which is the plant that produces opium,
is also produced as one of the most gorgeous flowers.
They’re all over English gardens,
and they’re all over a lot of American gardens.
They're spectacular flowers.
What people don’t realize very often is that you can turn the seed head
that comes out after the flower drops its blossoms
into opium.
And in fact, all you have to do is slit that seed head
and a white sap will emerge, and that is opium.
Now, you need quite a bit of it, and you have to collect it,
and it’s a somewhat difficult process,
but there it is.
It's a fairly mild narcotic you can make from it.
You can also make a tea.
And we’ve been told for many years
that you can only grow opium in Turkey or Afghanistan.
No, you can grow it in your backyard.
And the government doesn’t want us to know that,
so they have cracked down at various times
on people disseminating information about poppies.
So I grew poppies.
This is in the late 90s
at a time when the drug war was raging in America.
And I found a book called
written by a man named Jim Hogshire,
who was a zine writer, kind of underground drug journalist.
He would be writing for VICE in another time.
There I was writing for
and I’m going to see if I can make my own opium.
And so I got the seeds, and I started corresponding with him
and interviewing him.
And then suddenly I get word that he’s been arrested
on drug charges for manufacturing a narcotic.
And the evidence is a box of dried poppy heads
that he bought at a florist shop in Seattle.
And the weird wrinkle in the law that you were alluding to earlier
is that growing poppies is fine
unless you know it’s opium,
in which case it’s a crime, a federal crime.
If you have the knowledge in your head
and they can prove it, you’re guilty.
But the other thing I had learned since, we all learned,
is that the same summer
that I was having my fear and paranoia over my poppy crop
and the government was going after people like me,
Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company,
was introducing OxyContin and beginning the opioid crisis,
marketing it aggressively to doctors and consumers
as a safer, less addictive opiate,
and starting what ended up being
the biggest public health crisis tied to drugs
during the whole period of the drug war.
And actually, at the same time as Purdue is marketing Oxy,
within the war on drugs, there’s a really considered effort
to limit and decrease opioid substitution therapy and treatment
in favor of a kind of “Just Say No” abstinence model,
which is way less effective.
And I think that, between that and the poppies and Perdue,
it just illustrates how mixed up our relationship with this drug
and this plant really is.
The whole idea of harm reduction was not accepted at all.
I mean, there were a few people talking about it,
this idea that what kills people on opiates is not the opiate,
it’s the overdose, the fentanyl that it’s laced with,
or the fact that they’re using contaminated needles,
so many of the harms are related to the fact it’s illegal.
If it were legal and you knew exactly what dose you were getting,
people can go on for a very long time depending on opiates.
It doesn’t necessarily kill you or ruin your life.
But when it’s illegal, people are forced onto the black market.
So from a drug world point of view,
one of the big macro trends that we’re seeing now
is that for thousands of years,
all our drugs have been based on plants,
like alcohol, tobacco, heroin, cocaine.
But what we’re seeing now
is the rise of purely synthetic drugs,
which are only made in a lab.
As a plant writer,
what do you feel about that?
I think we can over-romanticize nature,
and the idea that they’re automatically better
because they’re plant drugs
isn’t always true.
You know, LSD came out of a lab,
even though it’s derived from a fungus, the ergot fungus,
and many people find that a really valuable substance.
And there are lots of drugs that,
you know, there’s a vaccine keeping a lot of us alive right now
that came out of a laboratory,
didn’t come out of a plant.
I think we learn from plants.
I think they’re the ultimate model.
So I think it depends.
I don't think we can generalize
and say plant drugs are better than synthetic drugs.
So if there was one major idea
or thought that you wanted people to take from this book
and this thread of research that you've engaged in,
what would that be?
Well, I think to understand the ambiguities of drugs,
you know, I’ve been saying lots of very positive things about them,
but people do get into trouble
and addiction is a real problem,
and it’s not always the drug’s fault.
It’s sometimes the fault of society
and the straitened circumstances of people’s lives.
But, you know, the Greeks really had it right.
Their word for drug was pharmakon,
a word that means both ally and poison.
And it has a third meaning too,
scapegoat.
And certainly scapegoats, we scapegoat drugs.
We blame a lot of our problems on drugs
because it’s easier than looking at ourself in the mirror
or looking at our society in the mirror.
So we should remember that the drug is one thing,
but it’s how we use it,
the respect that we bring to the experience,
the sense of intention,
and that we need to hold two conflicting ideas in our head
that the same substance can be an enormous boon to your life
or it can be hell.