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The Problem with Michael Pollan

Why a botanist should not support the drug war

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 7, 2023



For all his popular writing about psychoactive medicine, Michael Pollan supports prohibition. He believes it actually makes sense to outlaw Mother Nature's bounty. That's a strange position for a botanist living in a purportedly free country. Worse yet, Michael is hypocritical, because he believes that prohibition makes sense for you and I, but not for himself. That's why, in his lengthy book "How to Change Your Mind," he spends 400 pages telling of his personal experiences with psychedelics, only to confess on page 405 that he is not in favor of mushrooms being legal for mere human beings. Putting the elitist hypocrisy aside, I think this is an appalling position for a botanist to take.

But let's suppose for a moment that Mother Nature is so evil that outlawing her bounty makes sense - even though such measures would violate the natural law upon which America was founded and clash with Christian orthodoxy which tells us that people can be good or bad, not things. Even then, we have the proof of the last 100 years that prohibition causes civil wars overseas, militarizes police forces, creates inner-city violence, arms the gangs and the cartels, causes drive-by shootings, denies godsend medicines to the depressed and those in pain, and censors science. And what is Michael's argument in FAVOR of prohibition? A shroom might be misused by a young American kid.

Well, of course a shroom might be misused, Michael, but that's BECAUSE of the Drug War itself, which teaches Americans to fear drugs rather than to understand them. That's why the tellingly named National Institute for Drug Abuse publishes endless papers on misuse and abuse of drugs, but almost nothing on responsible use, which, as Dr. Carl L. Hart writes in "Drug Use for Grown-Ups," is by far the main way that psychoactive drugs are used in the real world, this despite the fact that the Drug Warrior does everything they can to keep Americans ignorant about drugs, since their goal is to make us fear rather than understand them.

And why do prohibitionists like Michael insist on thinking that young white American suburban kids are the only stakeholders in the prohibition debate? As a chronic depressive, I've been forced to go a lifetime now without godsend medicine that grows at my feet. Yet I've never heard of a Drug Warrior wringing their hands on my behalf. And there are hundreds of millions like me who suffer all so that we can protect Johnnie and Janie Whitebread from the politician-created boogieman called drugs. I'm not saying that Michael is racist himself, of course, but the prohibition that he supports (however lukewarmly) most definitely is. (See the book "Whiteout" for some of the many ways that this is so.)

The truth is that Michael is Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to drugs. The choice of his subject matter makes him sound progressive, but he occasionally lets slip a line which betrays a deep conservative streak as well. In supporting prohibition, for instance, in "How to Change Your Mind," Michael tells us that Nixon outlawed psychedelics in order to ensure the health of young men being recruited into the army. That's simply not true. Nixon didn't want the campus followers of Timothy Leary 1 2 3 to be fit for military service, he wanted them thrown in jail, preferably on felony charges to deny them the future right to vote.

He created drug laws in order to disenfranchise his opposition, a step that removed hundreds of thousands of blacks from the voting rolls and handed elections to Drug Warriors, and eventually to Donald Trump himself, who, if re-elected has voiced his determination to start executing those Black drug dealers that previous administrations had been satisfied with just throwing in jail.

If Michael is really excited about the psychoactive substances that he is studying, he should denounce the Drug War which keeps all those godsends from being used by his readers. Until then, Michael is treating those readers like Tantalus of the Greek myth, vividly exciting them about a host of substances that turn out to be just out of reach for everybody but Michael himself.











Notes:

1: “Full Text of ‘the Politics of Ecstasy.’” 2026. Archive.org. 2026. https://archive.org/stream/ecstaspoliticsof00learrich/ecstaspoliticsof00learrich_djvu.txt. (up)
2: The One Thing that Timothy Leary Got Wrong: a philosophical review of The Politics of Ecstasy DWP (up)
3: Timothy Leary was Right DWP (up)




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The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.

And we should not insist it's a problem if someone decides to use opium, for instance, daily. We certainly don't blame "patients" for using antidepressants daily. And getting off opium is easier than getting off many antidepressants -- see Julia Holland.

The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.

America created a whole negative morality around "drugs" starting in 1914. "Users" became fiends and were as helpless as a Christian sinner -- in need of grace from a higher power. Before prohibition, these "fiends" were habitues, no worse than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.

Racist drug warriors make cities dangerous with drug prohibition -- then they use that danger as an excuse to send in the National Guard.

Drug testing labs are the modern Inquisitors. We are not judged by the content of our character, but by the content of our digestive systems.

The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.

I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

Suicidal people should be given drugs that cheer them up immediately and whose use they can look forward to. The truth is, we would rather such people die than to give them such drugs, that's just how bamboozled we are by the war against drugs.

After watching my mother suffer because of the drug war, I hate to hear people tell me that the problem is drugs. WRONG! That's a western colonialist viewpoint. God loved his creation (see Genesis). He did not make trash. We need to use entheogenic medicines wisely.


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