The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (32 page)

availability of in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Süleyman the Magnificent

“suspension of disbelief”

Swedenborgianism

sweetness:

as apple marketing quality

as criterion for selection

historical meanings of

human desire for

of intoxication

role in plant/human coevolution

Swift, Jonathan

Switsers tulip, price of

symmetry, as criterion for selection

see also
pattern

Tancred
(Disraeli)

taste, as clue to toxicity

temperance movement

Terminator (genetic technology)

THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol)

Thoreau, Henry David

toxins, in plants

see also Bacillus thuringiensis
(Bt)

transcendence

see also
forgetting, consciousness; intoxication

transcendentalism

see also
Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Thoreau, Henry David

Triumph tulips

tulipomania:

Dionysian qualities of

as financial speculation

history of

tulips:

Apollonian qualities of

black-colored

breeding of

coevolution with people of

color “breaks” in

history of

and human desire for beauty

modern simplification of

mutability of

paintings of

virus infections of

see also
tulipomania

Turks, Ottoman

Turner, Frederick

“Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, The” (Nietzsche)

variation, as beauty principle

Vavilov, Nicolai

vegetables:

in contemporary gardens

reproductive strategy of

visual appeal of

Versailles, windstorm damage at

Wassenaer, Nicolaes van

Weil, Andrew

wheat:

in Europe

evolution of

genetic engineering of

wildness:

and Bt “Resistance Management Plan”

as Dionysian quality

within gardens

human impact on

and preservation of biodiversity

Wilson, E. O.

wine:

and Christianity

in classical Greece

Protestant views on

wijnkoopsgeld
(wine money)

witchcraft

Women’s Christian Temperance Union

wonder, sense of

yaje vine

York Imperial apple

Young, Arthur

Young, Steve

Yukon Gold potato

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MICHAEL POLLAN, a contributing writer for
The New York Times Magazine,
is the author of
Second Nature
and
A Place of My Own,
a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year in 1997. His writing has received numerous awards, including the QPB New Visions prize (for
Second Nature
) and the first Reuters–World Conservation Union Global Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism. Pollan lives in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac.

*The Granny Smith, a relatively tart green apple discovered in Australia in 1868 (by a Mrs. Smith), is something of an anomaly, though its survival probably owes to its cooking qualities, color, and virtual indestructibility.

*Though many flowers, like the lilies, possess both male and female organs, they go to great lengths to avoid pollinating themselves. That would defeat the floral point, which is the mixing of genes that cross-pollination ensures. A flower can avoid self-pollination chemically (by making its ovule and pollen grain incompatible), architecturally (by arranging stamen and pistil in the flower so as to avoid contact), or temporally (by staggering the times when their stamens produce pollen and their pistils are receptive).

*Among birds, the species most susceptible to parasites are the ones with the most extravagant plumage—probably because these are the ones that most need to advertise their fitness.

*Whatever the case, the more perfect the symmetry, the healthier—and therefore sweeter—the flower.

*It might also be that, for some of the Calvinist Dutch, financial abandon offered a way to atone for what they felt was the shame of their wealth, the embarrassment of their riches: they were trading their filthy lucre for the pristine beauty of a flower.

*More drug arrests are for crimes involving marijuana than any other drug: nearly 700,000 in 1998, 88 percent of them for possession. Marijuana cases account for most of the asset forfeitures that law enforcement budgets have come to rely on. Marijuana is the primary focus of drug prevention efforts in the schools, drug testing in the workplace, and public service advertising about drugs.

†What a dissenting Supreme Court justice in 1988 deplored as a new “drug exception to the Constitution” has been substantially based on marijuana cases. For example, in
Illinois v. Gates
(1983) the Supreme Court carved broad new exceptions to the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches, as well as the Sixth Amendment right to confront one’s accusers. The venerable principle of
posse comitatus,
which holds that the armed forces of the United States cannot be used to police U.S. territory, has been suspended during the war against marijuana, notably by President Reagan, who deployed troops to rout out growers in northern California. The First Amendment has suffered as well: magazines aimed at pot growers have been harassed and, in one case (
Sinsemilla Tips
), raided and closed down. In 1998 the federal government threatened to revoke the license of California doctors who exercised their First Amendment right to talk to patients about the medical benefits of marijuana. Also that year, Congress ordered the District of Columbia not to count the votes of its citizens in a referendum on medical marijuana. Arguably, the war against cannabis has also eroded the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial (since drastic mandatory minimum sentences force most marijuana defendants to accept plea bargains) as well as the presumption of innocence (since asset forfeiture allows the government to seize assets without proving guilt).

*Remove the twenty million or so Americans who use marijuana, and we are left with a “drug abuse epidemic” involving roughly two million regular heroin and cocaine users—a public health problem, to be sure, but serious enough to justify spending $20 billion a year (or modifying the Bill of Rights)?

*The practice of smoking as we know it wouldn’t come to Europe until Columbus brought it back from America, but the Scythians invented something like it around 700
B.C.
According to Herodotus, they would put their heads into small tents designed to trap the fumes from cannabis buds placed on red-hot rocks—“until they rise up to dance and betake themselves to singing.”

*Top-quality sinsemilla sells for upward of $500 an ounce, making cannabis America’s leading cash crop.

*Marijuana’s genetic revolution recalls an earlier horticultural watershed: the introduction of the China rose (
R. chinensis
) to Europe in 1789, an event that made it possible for the first time to breed roses that would flower more than once a season. This ultimately led to the development of the ever-blooming hybrid tea rose. For both the rose and marijuana, human mobility coupled with human desire—for a rose that would rebloom in August; for sinsemilla that would grow in the north—led to the reunification of two distinct evolutionary lines of a plant that had diverged thousands of years before. In both cases, the introduction of a set of plant genes found halfway around the world created undreamed-of new possibilities.

*Tobacco smoking and coffee drinking were taboo in the West before the Industrial Revolution. The German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch suggests that the two drugs became socially acceptable because they aided in industrialization’s “reorientation of the human organism to the primacy of mental labor.”

*Judging from their descriptions of its effects, the Greeks probably fortified their wine with various psychoactive herbs; there’s reason to think they also made religious use of ergot and
Amanita muscaria.

*Sadie Plant, another literary critic, has argued that Coleridge’s notion of the “suspension of disbelief” can also be traced to his use of opium.

*”There is a myth about such highs,” Sagan wrote; “the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved while high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. . . . If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I’m high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say, ‘Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!’ “ Sagan’s essay, attributed to “Mr. X,” appears in
Marihuana Reconsidered,
by Lester Grinspoon. After Sagan’s death in 1996, Grinspoon revealed Mr. X’s identity.

*Mechoulam thinks we’ll eventually find a neurotransmitter that does for remembering what the cannabinoids do for forgetting, and that the push-and-pull interaction of these two chemicals together determines what is filed in memory and what is thrown out.

*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.

*Most recently, as the medical value of marijuana has been rediscovered, medicine has been searching for ways to “pharmaceuticalize” the plant—find a way to harness its easily accessible benefits in a patch or inhaler that doctors can prescribe, corporations patent, and governments regulate. Whenever possible, Paracelsus’s lab-coated descendants have synthesized the active ingredients in plant drugs, allowing medicine to dispense with the plant itself—and any reminders of its pagan past.

*David Lenson draws a useful distinction between drugs of desire (cocaine, for example) and drugs of pleasure, such as cannabis. “Cocaine promises the greatest pleasure ever known in just a minute more . . . But that future never comes.” In this respect the cocaine experience is “a savage mimicry of consumer consciousness.” With cannabis or the psychedelics, on the other hand, “pleasure can come from natural beauty, domestic tasks, friends and relatives, conversation, or any number of objects that do not need to be purchased.”