Is it the quality of addictiveness that renders a substance illicit? Not in the case of tobacco, which I am free to grow in this garden. Curiously, the current campaign against tobacco dwells less on cigarettes’ addictiveness than on their threat to our health. So is it toxicity that renders a substance a public menace? Well, my garden is full of plants—datura and euphorbia, castor beans, and even the leaves of my rhubarb—that would sicken and possibly kill me if I ingested them, but the government trusts me to be careful. Is it, then, the prospect of pleasure—of “recreational use”—that puts a substance beyond the pale? Not in the case of alcohol: I can legally produce wine or hard cider or beer from my garden for my personal use (though there are regulations governing its distribution to others). So could it be a drug’s “mind-altering” properties that make it evil? Certainly not in the case of Prozac, a drug that, much like opium, mimics chemical compounds manufactured in the brain.
This is your mind on plants
by Michael Pollan
In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?
In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively—as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.
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意識をゆさぶる植物
アヘン・カフェイン・メスカリンの可能性
by マイケル・ポーラン
translated by 宮﨑真紀
■アヘン（鎮静系）──ケシの実
■カフェイン（覚醒系）──コーヒーノキ、茶
■ メスカリン（幻覚系）──ペヨーテ（サボテン）
精神活性物質を含む植物「ケシ」「コーヒーノキ」「ペヨーテ」が私たちの意識にもたらす“変容”をみずから体験し、その効果と意義をスリリングに解き明かした第一級のノンフィクション！
〈人間を虜する植物たちの生存戦略の「賜物」──それらは毒か、恵みか？〉
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人間が欲望する「向精神性物質」に磨きをかけ、人間との共依存関係の上に種の繁栄を遂げた植物たち。
“そこにある自然”に先人たちが発見した可能性とは何か？
「戦争」「産業革命」「先住民の駆逐」が紡いだ植物の物語とは？
人類学、生化学、植物学ほか、多岐にわたる知見を横断して論じた「ニューヨーク・タイムズ」ベストセラーの注目作！
Ehrlichman, you will recall, was President Nixon’s domestic policy adviser; he served time in federal prison for his role in Watergate. Baum came to talk to Ehrlichman about the drug war, of which he was a key architect. “You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman began, startling the journalist with both his candor and his cynicism. Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon White House “had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. . . . We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually, the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind