The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (14 page)

CHAPTER 3

Desire: Intoxication

Plant: Marijuana

(
CANNABIS SATIVA
X
INDICA
)

T
he forbidden plant and its temptations are older than Eden, go back further even than we do. So too the promise, or threat, that forbidden plants have always made to the creature who would taste them—the promise, that is, of knowledge and the threat of mortality. If it sounds as if I’m speaking metaphorically about forbidden plants and knowledge, I don’t mean to. In fact, I’m no longer so sure the author of Genesis was, either.

Living things have always had to make their way in a wild garden of flowers and vines, of leaves and trees and fungi that hold out not only nourishing things to eat but deadly poisons, too. Nothing is more important to a creature’s survival than knowing which is which, yet drawing a bright line through the middle of the garden, as the God of Genesis found, doesn’t always work. The difficulty is that there are plants that do other, more curious things than simply sustain or extinguish life. Some heal; others rouse or calm or quiet the body’s pain. But most remarkable of all, there are plants in the garden that manufacture molecules with the power to change the subjective experience of reality we call consciousness.

Why in the world should this be so—why should evolution yield plants possessing such magic? What makes these plants so irresistible to us (and to many other creatures), when the cost of using them can be so high? Just what is the knowledge held out by a plant such as cannabis—and why is it forbidden?

• • •

Start with the bright line, as all creatures must. How does one tell the dangerous plants from the ones that merely nourish? Taste is the first tip-off. Plants that don’t wish to be eaten often manufacture bitter-tasting alkaloids; by the same token, plants that do wish to be eaten—like the apple—often manufacture a superabundance of sugars in the flesh around their seeds. So as a general rule, sweet is good, bitter bad. Yet it turns out that it is some of the bitter, bad plants that contain the most powerful magic—that can answer our desire to alter the textures and even the contents of our consciousness. There it is, right in the middle of the word
intoxication,
hidden in plain sight:
toxic.
The bright line between food and poison might hold, but not the one between poison and desire.

• • •

The manifold and subtle dangers of the garden, to which a creature’s sense of taste offers only the crudest map, are mainly the fruits of strategies plants have devised to defend themselves from animals. Most of the ingenuity of plants—that is, most of the work of a billion years of evolutionary trial and error—has been applied to learning (or rather, inventing) the arts of biochemistry, at which plants excel beyond all human imagining. (Even now a large part of human knowledge about making medicines comes directly from plants.) While we animals were busy nailing down things like locomotion and consciousness, the plants, without ever lifting a finger or giving it a thought, acquired an array of extraordinary and occasionally diabolical powers by discovering how to synthesize remarkably complicated molecules. The most remarkable of these molecules (at least from our perspective) are the ones designed expressly to act on the brains of animals, sometimes to attract their attention (as in the scent of a flower) but more often to repel and sometimes even destroy them.

Some of these molecules are outright poisons, designed simply to kill. But one of the great lessons of coevolution (a lesson recently learned by designers of pesticides and antibiotics) is that the all-out victory of one species over another is often Pyrrhic. That’s because a powerful, death-dealing toxin can exert such a strong selective pressure for resistance in its target population that it is quickly rendered ineffective; a better strategy may be to repel, disable, or confound. This fact might explain the astounding inventiveness of plant poisons, the vast catalog of chemical curiosities and horrors that first flowered in Cretaceous times with the rise of the angiosperms. The same evolutionary watershed—Darwin’s “abominable mystery”—that ushered in the dazzling arts of floral attraction brought with it the darker arts of chemical warfare.

Some plant toxins, such as nicotine, paralyze or convulse the muscles of pests who ingest them. Others, such as caffeine, unhinge an insect’s nervous system and kill its appetite. Toxins in datura (and henbane and a great many other hallucinogens) drive a plant’s predators mad, stuffing their brains with visions distracting or horrible enough to take the creatures’ mind off lunch. Compounds called flavonoids change the taste of plant flesh on the tongues of certain animals, rendering the sweetest fruit sour or the sourest flesh sweet, depending on the plant’s designs. Photosensitizers present in species such as the wild parsnip cause the animals that eat it to burn in the sun; chromosomes exposed to these compounds spontaneously mutate when exposed to ultraviolet light. A molecule present in the sap of a certain tree prevents caterpillars that sample its leaves from ever growing into butterflies.

By trial and error animals figure out—sometimes over eons, sometimes over a single lifetime—which plants are safe to eat and which forbidden. Evolutionary counterstrategies arise too: digestive processes that detoxify, feeding strategies that minimize the dangers (like that of the goat, which nibbles harmless quantities of a great many different plants), or heightened powers of observation and memory. This last strategy, at which humans particularly excel, allows one creature to learn from the mistakes and successes of another.

The “mistakes” are, of course, especially instructive, as long as they’re not your own or, if they are, they prove less than fatal. For even some of the toxins that kill in large doses turn out in smaller increments to do interesting things—things that are interesting to animals as well as people. According to Ronald K. Siegel, a pharmacologist who has studied intoxication in animals, it is common for animals deliberately to experiment with plant toxins; when an intoxicant is found, the animal will return to the source repeatedly, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Cattle will develop a taste for locoweed that can prove fatal; bighorn sheep will grind their teeth to useless nubs scraping a hallucinogenic lichen off ledge rock. Siegel suggests that some of these adventurous animals served as our Virgils in the garden of psychoactive plants. Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee: Abyssinian herders in the tenth century observed that their animals would become particularly frisky after nibbling the shrub’s bright red berries. Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favorite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese (or Aryans or Scythians) to that plant’s special properties. Peruvian legend has it that the puma discovered quinine: Indians observed that sick cats were often restored to health after eating the bark of the cinchona tree. Tukano Indians in the Amazon noticed that jaguars, not ordinarily herbivorous, would eat the bark of the yaje vine and hallucinate; the Indians who followed their lead say the yaje vine gives them “jaguar eyes.”

• • •

Whenever I read something like this, I wonder, How do you tell when a jaguar is hallucinating? Then I think about Frank, my late, cranky old tomcat, who I became convinced used drug plants habitually in order to hallucinate. Every summer evening at around five, Frank would lumber into the vegetable garden for a happy-hour nip of
Nepeta cataria,
or catnip. He would first sniff, then tug at the leaves with his teeth and proceed to roll around in paroxysms of what looked to me like sexual ecstasy. His pupils would shrink to pinpricks and take on a slightly scary thousand-mile stare, preparatory to pouncing on unseen enemies or—who can say?—lovers. Frank would crash-land in the dirt, pick himself up, do a funny little sidestep, then pounce again until, exhausted, he’d go sleep it off in the shade of a tomato plant.

I learned later that catnip contains a chemical compound, called “nepetalactone,” which mimics the pheromone cats produce in their urine during courtship. This chemical key just happens to fit an aphrodisiac lock in a cat’s brain and apparently no other. It was amusing to watch a plant derange my cat, but also unsettling; for that brief interlude, Frank would wobble through the garden as though he were literally beside himself. Yet he’d be back again the next day—though, curiously, never before five. Maybe he ritualized the practice to keep it under control; or maybe it took him the better part of the day to remember just where it was that the magic plant grew.

I’d planted the catnip strictly for Frank’s pleasure, though looking back I sometimes wonder if the plant wasn’t also in my garden as a substitute, or placeholder, for the forbidden plant I sometimes wished I could grow for myself. Cannabis, I mean. At once an intoxicant, a medicine, and a fiber (this last use, admittedly, of absolutely no interest to me), cannabis is one of the most powerful of the plants that will grow around here; it is also, as I write, the most dangerous plant I could grow in my garden. Frank’s happy-hour ritual was a daily reminder that my garden was capable of producing much more than food or beauty, that it also could perform some rather remarkable feats of brain chemistry and by doing so answer other, more complicated desires.

• • •

I sometimes think we’ve allowed our gardens to be bowdlerized, that the full range of their powers and possibilities has been sacrificed to a cult of plant prettiness that obscures more dubious truths about nature, our own included. It hasn’t always been this way, and we may someday come to regard the contemporary garden of vegetables and flowers as a place almost Victorian in its repressions and elisions.

For most of their history, after all, gardens have been more concerned with the power of plants than with their beauty—with the power, that is, to change us in various ways, for good and for ill. In ancient times, people all over the world grew or gathered sacred plants (and fungi) with the power to inspire visions or conduct them on journeys to other worlds; some of these people, who are sometimes called shamans, returned with the kind of spiritual knowledge that underwrites whole religions. The medieval apothecary garden cared little for aesthetics, focusing instead on species that healed and intoxicated and occasionally poisoned. Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to “cast spells”—in our vocabulary, “psychoactive” plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (
Amanita muscaria
), and the skins of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.

The medieval gardens of witches and alchemists were forcibly uprooted and forgotten (or at least euphemized beyond recognition), but even the comparatively benign ornamental gardens that came after them went out of their way to honor the darker, more mysterious face of nature. The Gothic gardens of England and Italy, for example, always made room for intimations of mortality—by including a dead tree, say, or a melancholy grotto—and the occasional frisson of horror. These gardens were interested in changing people’s consciousness, too, though more in the way a horror movie does than a drug. It’s only been in modern times, after industrial civilization concluded (somewhat prematurely) that nature’s powers were no longer any match for its own, that our gardens became benign, sunny, and environmentally correct places from which the old horticultural dangers—and temptations—were expelled.

Or if not expelled, almost willfully forgotten. For even in Grandmother’s garden you’re apt to find datura and morning glories (the seeds of which some Indians consume as a sacramental hallucinogen) and opium poppies—right there, the makings of a witch’s flying ointment or apothecary’s tonic. The knowledge that once attended these powerful plants, however, has all but vanished. And as soon as this plant knowledge is restored to consciousness—as soon as, say, one forms the intention of slitting the head of an opium poppy to release its narcotic sap—so too must be its taboo. 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.

• • •

I once grew opium poppies in my garden—yes, with felonious intent. I also grew marijuana, back when that was no big deal. I still grow grapes and hops, both of which can be made into legal intoxicants (as long as I don’t sell them), and, in my herb garden, Saint-John’s-wort (an antidepressant), chamomile, and valerian (both mild sedatives).

I should probably explain my interest in these plants. At least in the beginning, this had less to do with my interest in using drugs, which was never more than mild, than with an impulse I think most gardeners share. In fact, by the time I planted a few cannabis seeds, in the early 1980s, I no longer smoked at all—pot, fairly reliably, rendered me paranoid and stupid. But I had just taken up gardening and was avid to try anything—the magic of a Bourbon rose or a beefsteak tomato seemed very much of a piece with the magic of a psychoactive plant. (I still feel this way.) So when my sister’s boyfriend asked if I might want to plant a few seeds he’d picked out of “some really amazing Maui,” I decided to give it a try—as much as anything, just to see if I could grow it.

To another gardener, this will not seem odd, for we gardeners are like that: eager to try the improbable (if only to harvest a good story), to see if we can’t grow an artichoke in zone five or brew homemade echinacea tea from the roots of our purple coneflowers. Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as small-time alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power. Maybe at some level we’re still in touch with the power of the old gardens. Also, one of the attractions of gardening is the independence it can confer—from the greengrocer, the florist, the pharmacist, and, for some, the drug dealer. One does not have to go all the way “back to the land” to experience the satisfaction of providing for yourself off the grid of the national economy. So, yes, I was curious to see if I could grow some “really amazing Maui” in my Connecticut garden. It seemed to me this would indeed represent a particularly impressive sort of alchemy. But as things turned out, my experiment in growing marijuana was of a piece with my experience smoking it, paranoid and stupid being the operative terms.