Browsing the web I came across a review of a book called The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan. It's divided into 4 parts, one of which is about marijuana. Here's a quote from the review:
Quote:
Before reading part three, I was on the fence regarding legalization of cannabis. I'm off it now, squarely in favor. Prior to President Reagan taking the reins of power, pot was more or less tolerated. It was a kind of goofy drug, glamorized by people like Robert Michum going to jail for toking up, or the Beats--Ginsberg and company, and, of course, hippies. But suddenly Reagan came in and war was declared. He had a knee jerk conservative reaction against what pot had come to stand for: "Whatever the case, it's hard to believe such a powerful new taboo against marijuana would have stuck if the plant hadn't already been a powerful symbol. Certainly marijuana's close identification with the counterculture made it an attractive target to a drug war that, whatever else it may have been, was part of a political and cultural reaction against the sixties."
This ongoing war, Pollan points out, has threatened fourth, first, and sixth amendment rights. Think of it, not one person has ever died of the effects of smoking pot. Alcohol, heroin, cocaine kill. Grass? Benign by comparison, yet more users are prosecuted, if not persecuted, for weed than for all the others. Why? Did you know if you grow cannabis on your land, the land can be seized for being guilty of growing cannabis? Huh?
Here Pollan puts some point to his blade: The old capitalist-based Protestant religions that shaped our nation. What does marijuana do? Takes you out, makes you more in the moment, encourages an exploration of consciousness, expands the horizon of thought (or minute details into a new horizon), causes short term memory loss, takes a bite out of constant material concerns and yearnings, and, worst of all, like sex, or meditation or (ha, ha) art, disrupts the need to control the ever-numbing future tense/past tense fear that precludes the here and now in a bath of perpetual worry.
Bring on the Judeo-Christian concept of monotheism. Pot tends to open up to pantheism, even paganism; a Blakeian universe in a grain of sand vs. the promise of heaven to come (or hell to pay). Apollo vs. Dionysus once again. Where do the work ethic and reward-later concepts fit, the capitalist approach, into the grain of sand view? It doesn't, and there is the conflict. It boils down, too, to the Freudian (here anti-) pleasure principle: "More even than most plant drugs, cannabis, by immersing us in the present and offering something like fulfillment here and now, short-circuits the metaphysics of desire on which Christianity and capitalism (and so much else in our civilization) depend."
But for Pollan, a gardener, the main thrust is that the garden, here intoxicating, reflects a place both earthbound and transcendent. God thrust Adam and Eve out of Eden because they ate of the tree of knowledge, and they had then to toil in pain far away from generous, pleasurable nature. It's been a rough climb for the case of nature and pleasure ever since. "...for civilization seems bent on breaking or at least forgetting our connection to the earth." It's no accident that they paved paradise to put up a bank.
I also found a video of a lecture given by Mr. Pollan at the University of California at Berkeley in 2002. It covers a wide area of ground, touching on topics such as the co-evolutionary relationship between humans and psychoactive plants, the effects of psychoactive plants on human culture, and the War on Drugs.
The main focus of the lecture is on cannabis. Pollan notes that cannabis as we know it today has had two main lines of evolutionary descent: one for hemp fiber and one for medicine. The hemp plant line of descent started in China and traveled west to Europe and then on to America. The medicinal/intoxication line of descent began in Central Asia and then moved on to India and then down to Africa. From Africa it came to the New World (first in South America) with the slave trade. It also spread from Egypt to Europe with Napoleon's army returning to France.
Along the way, we changed the plant by selecting for either better fiber or a better drug.
And the plant changed us. It changed us individually by its medicinal effects, but it also changed us collectively.
Pollan discusses some of the cultural effects that marijuana has had and then moves on to what we have learned about the brain through studying cannabis. Particularly, he discusses endogenous cannabinoids and the role they play in forgetting, noting that the ability to forget is a mental operation that is almost as important as the ability to remember.
Pollan then raises some interesting ideas about the importance that cannabis and other psychoactive plants may have played in philosophy and religion. He then concludes with some comments about the War on Drugs.
Re: Cannabis, Forgetting, and the Botany of Desire
I just found a transcript of the video lecture. It also includes a panel discussion and Q&A with the audience which are not in the video. I have added the transcript to the DF archive here.
04-05-2008, 18:58
Hybrid Mode
