My Conversation with Michael Pollan

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My Conversation with Michael Pollan

about the war on drugs

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 29, 2022

A few years ago, I got in touch with Michael Pollan's publicist, briefly explaining my concerns about the author's lukewarm stance on drug legalization ¹ . I pointed out that I was a lifelong victim of the Drug War, which had turned me into an eternal patient by outlawing godsend plant medicine while rendering me chemically dependent upon Big Pharma ² ³ "meds" for life.

Update: June 17, 2025

I went on to explain how this dependency had lowered my morale and turned me into a ward of the healthcare state, how it had obliged me to make expensive trimonthly visits to see a complete stranger who was 1/3 my age, all in order to receive yet another prescription for expensive and mind-numbing pills, after first, of course, answering a series of humiliating and invasive questions. (On a scale of 1 to 10, how was I feeling today? Had I contemplated suicide ⁴ over the last 3 months? ANSWER: Only when I thought about how the Drug War had turned me into an eternal patient.) I ended the strategically short letter by politely asking if I might have the honor of contacting Michael to elaborate my views on these topics.

To my great surprise, the gatekeeper responded promptly, telling me that she had passed my email along to Michael and that he would contact me shortly. Finally, I thought. After years of having my views ignored by psychiatrists, professors, authors, publishers and academics in general, I could get my message out to a real mover-and-shaker, someone who could help popularize at least some of my unique insights about the endless downsides of prohibition.

The good news is that Michael did contact me shortly as promised. Moreover he then generously agreed to read my extensive thoughts on this topic, which ended up taking up as many as 50 pages. This, of course, is far more than I could reasonably ask of any author, let alone a superstar, and the fact that he obliged me so generously speaks volumes about his humanity and open-mindedness.

I preface thus much lest the following criticisms be misconstrued as an attack upon Michael himself rather than on the viewpoints that I attribute to him.

For now we come to the apparent bad news: After spending several months writing my lengthy tract that I hoped would expose the folly of the Drug War, containing 40,000 words that I listened to on my headset as I walked around a nearby lake, determined to hone my message to the point where the truths it posited would strike the reader as inevitable, I received a response.

I hovered my mouse over the Gmail link, expecting to encounter a lively discussion of the topics that I had broached, some of which I was sure had never been mentioned before by anyone on planet Earth.

Then I clicked -- and my heart sank.

I had not yet read a single word, and yet my hopes had already died, for Michael's response to my 40,000 words consisted of one short paragraph. Either my ideas had completely flummoxed him, leaving him literally speechless, or else he had found literally no points in my screed that he thought even merited rebuttal.

I finally brought myself to read the unexpectedly terse response. Basically, Michael assured me that he had read my paper in its entirety and that he would think about the points that it contained.

"That's that," I thought, and I began moping around, trying to think of my next "big idea" for promulgating insights that the world seemed so determined to ignore. I wouldn't mind so much if the world disagreed with my ideas: but no one ever does. They simply ignore them instead, leaving me to ask myself: "Wherein do I offend?"

Of course, I can't really blame Michael for playing his cards close to his chest. Suppose he told me that I had raised some great points -- like the fact that the Drug War censors scientists or that it renders shock therapy necessary because the government outlaws plants like coca that could cheer people up? I might start telling everyone that Michael Pollan endorses my concerns about the Drug War, and then his brand might be compromised. For an author who targets a mainstream audience cannot afford to get too far out in front of public opinion. That's the one benefit of being a nobody like myself: I can pluck the last nerve of anyone on earth and my bank account will not suffer for it.

I am not suggesting here that Michael was being disingenuous, merely that I could understand it if he were. Besides, it's common sense to avoid offending one's paying audience unnecessarily. Almost any author could ruin themselves financially by being completely honest with their audience about every hot-button issue under the sun.

But now we come to my issue with Michael:

He is a botanist, and I believe that all botanists should be against the very idea of outlawing Mother Nature's bounty. That should be common sense and a first principle of botanical study. For once we grant the idea that Mother Nature's bounty has to be "safe" in order to be accessed by human beings, we turn over the reins of botany and science in general to politicians. That is not just an assault upon the freedom of science, but it is an assault upon the natural law upon which Jefferson founded America, for according to John Locke himself, we have a right to the use of the land "and all that lies therein."

Instead of protesting the Drug War on these most basic of American principles, Michael plays right into the hands of these Drug Warriors by fretting that, indeed, psychedelic mushrooms could cause bad trips and so therefore should be legalized slowly, if ever (which is tragic news to folks like myself, who have already waited an entire lifetime now for the "privilege" of being able to use the medicines that grow at their very feet).

But even if we grant the disturbing notion that Natural Law is henceforth invalid in America (and therefore, as a practical matter, around the entire world!), Michael fails to realize that there are far more stakeholders than uneducated youth when it comes to the prohibition of desired substances. There are the blacks who die in inner cities thanks to the guns and violence that naturally follow prohibition. There are the children who are orphaned by drug-war violence in nations where our prohibition has caused civil wars. There are the hundreds of thousands who have died in Latin America over the last 20+ years due to violence that was a natural result of outlawing a plant medicine that the Incas considered to be divine. There are the children in hospice who suffer unnecessary pain because doctors deny them morphine ⁵ thanks to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. There are the scientists whose research into cures for depression and Alzheimer's, etc., are censored by a government that prohibits them from freely studying almost all naturally occurring psychoactive medicines. Then there are the millions of depressed 'patients' like myself who are turned into wards of the healthcare state because the Drug War has denied them access to the medicines that grow at their very feet.

So why does Michael have this lopsided concern for our hapless youth, particularly as the problem he cites could be resolved through education rather than incarceration ⁶ ?

It's because Drug Warriors never talk about education. Drug warriors are generally fiscal conservatives and the only thing they're willing to spend money on are prisons, law enforcement, and the military. The thought of turning the DEA into the Drug EDUCATION Agency would never occur to them. Indeed, the original charter of the Office of National Drug Control Policy promoted user ignorance by forbidding its members from even mentioning any positive or safe uses of the drugs that had been outlawed by demagogue politicians.

So even when we grant the validity of Michael's concern, we find that it is the Drug War itself which promotes the ignorance that causes the problem in question.

But then that is the classic M.O. of all Drug Warriors: They point to problems that are created by the Drug War itself and then blame them on "drugs." And so Obama's drug advisor Kevin Sabet continues to decry the increasing use of cannabis today, failing to realize that the Drug War itself has made marijuana popular by outlawing all its psychoactive competition -- like the coca leaf, for instance, which the long-lived Peruvians have chewed for millennia to promote physical endurance and social harmony, just as Americans drink coffee to promote mental clarity and ambition.

I was hoping to share these concerns of mine directly with Michael himself via email, but the gatekeeper is silent to my entreaties this time around, which is understandable, of course. Miracles do not generally happen twice.

So I've posted this essay instead, in the hopes that the author of "How to Change Your Mind" will one day read it and decide to change HIS mind about the Drug War, by proclaiming what I believe that he as an American botanist has a duty to proclaim: namely, that government never had the right to outlaw naturally occurring medicines in the first place.

Because once you grant legislators an exception to Natural Law when it comes to criminalizing Mother Nature, all manner of politicized evil follows: as has been clearly demonstrated over the last 50+ years by the crowding of American prisons, the creation of civil wars overseas, and the establishment of a psychiatric pill mill ⁷ which has turned me into a patient for life.

Author's Follow-up:

June 17, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

It will be objected that I am a nobody and hence I should be grateful for merely receiving a one-time "audience" with the likes of Michael. But that's the thing: I am not a nobody. I am a drug expert -- or at least I should be in a country that considers uncredentialed entrepreneurs like Betty Ford and Kitty Dukakis to be drug experts. I too have skin in the game. I have lived the downsides of drug prohibition for over half a century now and therefore have a unique outlook on the issues concerned. But then it seems that the only self-styled drug experts whom America acknowledges are those who have turned their own drug use into a morality play and have asked the world to join with them in repenting of drug use altogether by letting go and letting god -- or at least "letting" a higher power of some sort. Besides, the American God is science and so those who complain about the "scientific" drugs that they have been shunted off onto by drug prohibition (i.e., those made under the purblind assumptions of reductive behaviorism) are considered to be ungrateful. Didn't we know that science has conquered depression for us -- albeit with the help of expensive "meds" that have to be taken every day for an entire lifetime?

It is interesting that those who promote such drugs for the likes of me are considered drug experts, but when people on the receiving end of their nostrums protest the niggardly choices with which they are thereby left, they are told to shut up and to take their meds. Doctors and moralists are the experts in the age of the Drug War, after all, not 'patients'-- not even those who have gone an entire lifetime without the freedom to live a full life thanks to the paleolithic mindset of drug prohibition. And make no mistake, that mindset is pure caveman. For when Drug Warriors say things like "Fentanyl ⁸ kills" and "Crack kills," they are philosophically indistinguishable from the caveman of yore who shouted "Fire bad!" All such fearmongers would have us demonize dangerous substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. Indeed, only a childish caveman could blame flowers and mushrooms for humanity's problems -- which is why I tried -- in vain, alas -- to get Michael Pollan to renounce his support for drug prohibition, which is so unbecoming a botanist, or any freedom-loving American, for that matter.

Notes:

1: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
4: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
5: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
6: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
7: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
8: Fentanyl does not steal loved ones: Drug Laws Do DWP (up)

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"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann

Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.

Laughing gas inspired the philosophy of William James. Outlawing N20 is outlawing academic freedom. Laughing gas should be available for the suicidal. Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.

The most addictive drugs have a bunch of great uses, like treating pain and inspiring great literature. Prohibition causes addiction by making their use as problematic as possible and denying knowledge and choices. It's always wrong to blame drugs.

Problem 2,643 of the war on drugs: It puts the government in charge of deciding what counts as a true religion.

Americans love to hate heroin. But there is no rational reason why folks should not use heroin daily in a world in which we consider it their medical duty to use antidepressants daily.

"The Legislature deliberately determines to distrust the very people who are legally responsible for the physical well-being of the nation, and puts them under the thumb of the police, as if they were potential criminals." -- Aleister Crowley on drug laws

It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.

My local community store here in the sticks sells Trump "dollar bills" at the checkout counter. I don't know what's worse: a president encouraging insurrection or an electorate that does not see that as a problem.

Most people think that drugs like cocaine, MDMA, LSD and amphetamines can only be used recreationally. WRONG ! This represents a very naive understanding of human psychology. We deny common sense in order to cater to the drug war orthodoxy that "drugs have no benefits."

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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My Conversation with Michael Pollan

about the war on drugs

Author's Follow-up:

June 17, 2025

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

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