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Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

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It's been more than 50 years since President Nixon declared a war on drugs back in 1971.

President Nixon: America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Successive administrations of Democrats and Republicans alike have advanced policies like lengthy, mandatory minimum sentences resulting in the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of people for low-level and non-violent drug offenses.

Along with an enormous carceral state, the so-called war on drugs generated a culture of fear and shame urging young people to, just say no. Bombarding Americans with public service announcements like these.

Speaker: This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?

Melissa Harris-Perry: The problem is the frying egg version of your brain on drugs is at best incomplete because this is also your brain and this, is also a drug.

Speaker: All this stuff. Coffee, maybe it isn't coffee at all.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This thank goodness is your brain on drugs. With its campaign of fear and incarceration. The war on drugs has left the public and policymakers with incomplete, historical, and deeply racialized understandings of drugs and crime.

After all, even as families and communities of color were devastated by the effects of massive incarceration, a tiny sliver of the wealthiest capitalized on the prescription drug market. As companies like Purdue Pharma made billions while contributing to a devastating and continuing opioid crisis.

Today there's a discernible if incomplete shift in state-level policies that have fueled the drug war with some organizers pushing to legalize possession and use of certain drugs in some states.

Speaker: People in Oregon will face dramatically reduced consequences for possessing user amounts of certain illegal drugs, including ecstasy, heroin, and cocaine.

Speaker: Basically getting a ticket instead of going to jail.

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Michael Pollan: My name is Michael Pollan.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Pollan is co-founder of the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and author of a paradigm-shifting book.

Michael Pollan: This Is Your Mind On Plants.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This Is Your Mind On Plants. It's so different than that frying egg, right? Pollan asks us to ask ourselves some big questions. What is a drug? Why are some legal and commonly and openly used while others are cast into the shadows of crime and punishment? In This Is Your Mind On Plants Pollan writes extensively about three drugs, opium, caffeine, and mescaline, all of which are also plant-based.

He begins by resurfacing a piece. He first published for Harper's Magazine in 1997, An Avid Gardener. Pollan writes about an experiment conducted by him in his own garden, using seeds. He bought that are legal and commonly for sale. He grew opium poppies to see if he could actually make his own opium.

Michael Pollan: Technically, if you're growing-- This is Papaver somniferum. The opium poppy, which you can buy seeds and seedlings for anywhere pretty much. Technically if you are aware that they are a Schedule I substance, which they are, you are breaking the law by planting them. As long as you don't, turn them into anything like I did, [laughs] turned them into poppy tea or laudanum.

You're probably going to be okay, but technically, if you have the idea in your head that you're growing a drug, you are breaking the law. I'm sorry to inform you because now all your listeners know this. [laughs]

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to dig in on that a little bit. Talk, speak more about this notion because I think it's going to help us make that turn from plants to drugs, which is part of what you're deconstructing here. I was fine till I read your book and now I know what my plant can do, help me with that.

Michael Pollan: Opium poppies are an amazing plant. Besides being gorgeous, they're one of my favorite flowers to grow and they're pretty easy to grow. They contain opium. Opium is simply that white latex that if you knick the seed pod emerges, bleeds out and all opium is that stuff rolled up and burned. There are other simpler ways to take advantage of it.

I'm not talking about a serious opiate that's going to addict you and lead to overdose, but you can make something like poppy tea, which is a very mild narcotic tea that people in the middle east drink all the time. They drink it at funerals to take away the edge. It was used for a long time as an aspirin or a mild pain killer, but the government doesn't want us to do it.

I learned this the hard way several years ago. I had heard about this from an underground press book called Opium For The Masses. I was writing garden columns at the time and I thought, oh, what a cool idea for a column, I'll grow my own opium and see what it's like. Then the person who'd written that book, who I was interviewing gets arrested. They send in a squad of people, throw him up against the wall, take his computer, and charge them with manufacturing a Schedule I substance.

A federal crime that has a serious set of penalties and this led to a fearful and paranoid season in my garden. You might say, as I wondered if what I was doing was going to get my house confiscated and land me in jail? It didn't, but it was frightening enough that I actually ended up censoring the piece before I published it in Harper's. I took out because a lawyer had told me the parts that would antagonize the government.

The piece was a confession to a crime in effect, but the parts that would antagonize the government were where I told you how to turn your poppy heads into tea, which is not very complicated. What's called the trip report where I describe the sensations of when you drink this stuff.

I took it out in the interest of protecting myself from going to jail and always felt bad about it, that I'd self-censored. When I was writing this new book, which is really a look at three psychoactive plants, I thought this is the time to publish it in its proper form with the restored passages. The drug war is not quite as bad as it was back in the '90s when I first published the piece.

The other thing though-- The other reason I was eager to publish it is that so my adventure or misadventure with the poppies took place in the summer of 1996. Little did I know that that very year was when Purdue Pharma was introducing OxyContin. They were planting the seeds of what became the opioid crisis. Rather than focusing on that disaster, the government was coming after gardeners like me who were making a little poppy tea.

It was a great illustration of the absurdity of the drug war, which focused so much energy on illicit growers doing in the case of growing poppies something really not fundamentally serious. Completely overlooking the fact that in the realm of legal drugs, we were starting the biggest public health crisis connected to drugs since the drug war began in 1970.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's exactly the turn you made here that I think is, so critical as your mind on plants is this important plan I think maybe because I'm X Gen and this is your brain on drugs, public service announcement.

Michael Pollan: The egg cracking into the sizzling pan that many people watched while high.

Melissa Harris-Perry: [laughs] I suppose that is true.

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I suppose I've never thought about it in part because it really worked on me. I was completely terrified of drugs and completely terrified of police, of arrest, of incarceration. There was no lighting, there was no inhaling. For me, the notion was that it would be the end of my life to walk down this path. That was a path.

Then you put it here next to coffee in one chapter and next to the completely legal, but devastating production and pushing of OxyContin. Let's see if we can untangle that a little bit.

Michael Pollan: It's no accident that I wanted to include a legal drug, something that 90% of humanity has a daily engagement with, which is to say caffeine in the form of coffee or tea or chocolate or soda. Most sodas are caffeinated. We allow the soda industry to essentially addict our children to caffeine. To remind people that this desire to change consciousness is not some fringe desire but it's shared by all of us. That we all do something often involving a plant or a fungus to change the texture of our consciousness and how we feel and how the world appears to us.

Caffeine is an interesting case because it's so transparent. It's so in the background of our lives but as soon as you give it up, which I did for three months in order to write about it, you realize that it shapes who you are and how you go through the day. In its absence, you feel awful but not just awful but not yourself. I think that was the most striking thing for me. I gave up coffee and tea for three months.

I subsisted on mint tea and Kamaal tea. Even though I got over the withdrawal and there are real withdrawal symptoms as there are from any drug dependence, once that passed I was okay but I didn't feel like myself. What that told me is myself, my default sense of how the world appears and how I moved through it was caffeinated itself. That had become my default consciousness. That was quite striking and I sure missed it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Then what does that tell you or tell us about what a drug is?

Michael Pollan: It's very hard to define a drug. A drug is something you ingest that changes you in some ways but you could say that about many kinds of food. Sugar has a similar effect. Then what do you do with chicken soup which my mother used to give to me when I was sick and had amazing healing properties, is that a drug or a food? The same agency regulates both the food and drug administration but even they can't really draw a distinction.

They define drugs as what we say they are. [laughs] What about a placebo, a sugar pill which actually does have an effect on you? It's very hard to determine. Once you get to illicit drugs all we can say is these are ones that governments deem illegal and that changes over time. Once upon a time in this country, in the 1930s, we had prohibition and alcohol was illegal but at that same time, the prohibitionist trying to take alcohol away from people would kick back at the end of the day with one of their women's tonics. What did those contain? Opium or cannabis and that was fine.

There's a constant shift in which drugs we regard as evil and which drugs we regard as blessings. The Greeks understood this, they called drugs pharmacon and it means both blessing and poison. Drugs are both. It really depends on the context that they're tools and they can be used in good ways or bad ways. What I'm trying to do in this book is shake us out of our preconceptions about drugs, the education you had.

The just say no education which didn't work because it just was so hostile to human nature. I would say in that there is a universal desire to change consciousness. This is a drive like sex, like food. It's a weirder one in some ways and a little harder to explain but it appears to be common among all humans. Of course, drugs are not the only way we do it. We do it with extreme sports, we do it with fasting.

Kids do it by spinning till they're dizzy, we do it by putting ourselves in risky environments and we do it through meditation. There are ways yet to be invented. I'm sure but it's just such a curious thing about us that we're not satisfied with our default everyday consciousness.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That may be our incentive. What is the incentive of plants to help us along this journey of changing our consciousness?

Michael Pollan: What's in it for the plants. Look at the fate of coffee. Here is a shrub that existed only in this narrow area in Ethiopia, in Eastern Africa, not a lot of habitat. Now, look at it. This plant has spread around, it girdles the world in the tropics at a certain altitude. It has millions of people work to make these plants happy. This has been a very winning strategy for the coffee plant.

Now it didn't start producing caffeine in order to appeal to humans or addict them or enlist them in a diabolical plot to take over the world. It started as far as we know, creating this molecule because it needed a pesticide. The existential predicament of plants, of course, is they can't get up and move. They have to use chemistry where we use locomotion and they create these marvelous Alkalides, chemical compounds that in many cases repel insects or ruin their appetites or somehow mess with their minds to disrupt their feeding.

Caffeine was such a molecule.

At a certain point, the plant recognized I'm speaking metaphorically that it might repel bugs but it sure attracts humans and that turned out to be a really winning strategy. What's curious though too is that the plant's cleverness about caffeine goes even further. It was recently discovered that certain plants manufacture caffeine in their nectar. Now that's not where you would want to put a pesticide. That's where you're trying to attract insects.

These plants and the citrus family is one family that makes this stuff, recognized the power of caffeine to attract and indeed addict animals, in this case, bees. There's been studies done in England and Germany that shows that plants that produce just a little bit of caffeine in their nectar are preferred by bees. That those bees are more likely to remember those plants and return to them over and over and over again.

It makes them as the researchers say more faithful pollinators, which I love that phrase. Basically, caffeine does for bees what it does for us, turns them into much better workers. If you ever wonder why your boss gives you a coffee break, think about it. Your boss is giving you free drugs, coffee, and tea and time in which to enjoy them. There must be something in it for the employer. Indeed there is, coffee and tea make us better workers, more productive, more endurance, more care, more dexterity.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Take that third step for us. I get your boss gives you the coffee break to make you the better worker but how has caffeine benefited society broadly? Is civilization aware that it's using drugs in this way?

Michael Pollan: I think caffeine has had a powerful effect on our civilization without question. It certainly contributed to the industrial revolution. It's important to remember that before caffeine was introduced in Europe which happens in the 1640s, people were drunk all the time. Alcohol was the way you changed consciousness, but not only that you drank because alcohol was safer than water because the fermentation in the alcohol itself basically sanitized the water.

Even young kids were given mild alcoholic drinks like hard cider. People were in this day state a lot of the time, morning, noon, and night and you can't really run an industrial revolution with such a population. You need people who can safely operate heavy equipment. You need people who can do double entry bookkeeping and think with a certain amount of clarity. You need people who can stay up really late which was hard to do before caffeine. Caffeine allowed us to disconnect from the solar clock.

There's also a very interesting history about the role of caffeine and the enlightenment. This flowering of rationalist thought that happens very soon after caffeine is introduced to Europe and you see it in the great writers of the enlightenment people like Jean Rousseau who consume 71 cups of coffee a day supposedly and got a lot done. It encourages a very linear rational way of thinking. Historians believe it contributed both to the age of reason and the enlightenment and that yes the course of our civilization will be very different had caffeine not been introduced.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Something I think will be viable is if we actually just walk through each of the three and do a what is your mind on. What is happening to your brain on opium?

Michael Pollan: You have a set of receptors in your brain that respond to opiates, endorphins are the chemical we produce ourselves that hooks onto that receptor. It relieves pain and produces a sensation of euphoria. It's a very basic physiological reaction that's pretty well understood. In general, most of these psychoactive plants, and this is the miracle about them, have produced a molecule that just happens to fit perfectly into a receptor site that we already have in our brains.

Usually for an endogenous chemical, a chemical we're producing ourselves for our own purposes. The drugs hijack those receptor sites and make them do things. In the case of caffeine, the neurotransmitter that it mimics is something called adenosine. Adenosine is an interesting chemical. You have a bunch of receptors for it in your brain, and I think throughout your body and over the course of the day adenosine levels rise.

Adenosine is a chemical that basically is a signal to the brain that it's time to go to bed. As you gradually get tired, the reason you're tired is higher and higher amounts of adenosine collecting in your bloodstream. The caffeine blocks, it latches on to the same receptor and blocks it, so the adenosine can't do its thing, so your brain is not getting that signal that you're tired and it's time to shut down for the day. In the case of mescaline like most of the classical psychedelics, it is most serotonin and it hooks into these serotonin 2A receptors. Beyond that, we don't really know what's going on, but there's a cascade of effects that affects perception, the visual cortex, and the wiring of the brain as a whole.

It appears that the brain is temporarily rewired in ways that allow various brain networks to communicate with one another that wouldn't ordinarily be in touch. This governor of all brain function called the default mode network seems to diminish in its power, and you have a more anarchic brain on psychedelics.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How different might it be now if some of the other two drugs would you write about in the book? In the last book the criminalization and the social stigma around them?

Michael Pollan: In the case of opiates, this is a drug we regard as a scourge now and evil in all ways, but we forget how important opiates have been to medicine. For most of our history, medicine consists of relieving pain. There were no cures or very few cures and opium for 5,000 or 6,000 years has been the drug that brought relief from suffering. It's the drug that also eases the passage to death. It is a great blessing and at the same time, it can be abused and ruin lives.

It's our inability to hold these two very contradictory ideas in our heads at the same time that the same substance can be a blessing or a scourge. We have trouble with ambiguity but I think when it comes to drugs we have to embrace it. In the case of mescaline, civilization as a whole is not or our civilization is not deeply involved with it. The reason I was interested in it was because,it's played a very important role in indigenous culture. Native Americans use mescaline but in the form of the cactus peyote as part of their religious observances.

It's a fascinating case because I think when most of us think of psychedelics and mescaline is a classical psychedelic. We think of them as socially disruptive forces. Psychedelics gave us the '60s and the disruptions of the '60s and the anti-war movement. That's how we tagged them as disruptive, but take the same kind of substance and put it in the context of Native American culture, and you find a drug that is actually socially incredibly conservative or culturally very conservative, that it's used to hold the community together.

It's used to heal the community when there are tensions and it's a very beautiful ceremony that is not at all dionysian. It's very rigidly prescribed, highly ritualized but it has been from the Native Americans I talk to one of the key factors that's allowed Indian culture to survive. It and it came into use. The Native American church is established at a time when the official policy of the federal government is to obliterate native culture, to kidnap children, and put them in boarding schools.

To force tribes that have been hunter-gatherers onto reservations to become agriculturalists. it was a deliberate policy of cultural destruction. The rise of this ceremony around peyote which is a revival of a practice that went back thousands of years is really credited with keeping Indian identity whole. It's a beautiful story and it completely rocks your idea of what psychedelics do to a society.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's a story rarely surfaced in national discourse that decries the effects of drugs on communities. For the native American church, fighting to ensure access to so-called drugs in the form of sacred peyote was foundational for asserting first amendment rights. Even as the Clinton administration aggressively prosecuted the drug war, the president signed an amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act protecting the rights of Native American persons to transport possess and use peyote for bona fide traditional ceremonial purposes.

Participant: My name is [unintelligible 00:24:41], [unintelligible 00:24:42] and according to the IRA government the [unintelligible 00:24:47] tribe I am the current president, for the Native American Church of South Dakota. Also a founding board member of the indigenous peyote conservation initiative.

Melissa Harris-Perry: [unintelligible 00:24:57]gave a virtual presentation with the Harvard Divinity School last fall, on the sacrament of peyote and how the Native American Church uses the cactus.

Participant: Understand we are trying to heal the historical trauma that was imposed upon us by the colonizers.

Melissa Harris-Perry: While the movements gained ground on decriminalizing various psychedelic drugs the National Council of Native American Churches and the Indigenous Peyote Conservation initiative, have asked that peyote not be decriminalized for popular use. The peyote cactus only grows naturally in a small part of South Texas and leaders of the native American church have been noticing a shortage of the cactus. They worry that an increased interest by non-native persons would further diminish supplies of a sacred medicinal plant.

Participant: The indigenous people living in harmony at one point in time are trying to heal, and the decriminalization nature, movement, the psychedelic Renaissance has put in pressure and will put pressure on these [unintelligible 00:25:59]. These plant-based medicines.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We're back with Michael Pollan and the possibly wonderful world of psychedelic plants after this break. We're back with The Takeaway. I'm continuing my conversation with bestselling author Michael Pollan. Talk to me then, a bit about the politics of the social construction of these plants as drugs. I think part of what I appreciate so much about the book is that you don't just do it well this is bad this is good.

These are things that clearly should always be outside of what is acceptable for you, you do walk into that complex space. Other ways that we might socially construct our understanding of plants and of our desire to impact and change our minds and consciousness in ways that are more productive going forward?

Michael Pollan: I would hope so. It's not easy. We tend to fall into these binaries of it's illegal and bad or it's legal and good, and they're not always that helpful. The drug war I think presented itself as a public health campaign. It was really a political campaign. I think we're beginning to see that now that President Nixon embraced it as a technique to disrupt the Black community and the counterculture and the anti-war movement. We've been lied to about drugs for a very long time.

I think what's happening with psychedelics right now is a very interesting shift in the identity of a class of drugs that had been demonized beginning around 1965 as socially disruptive as destroyers of young minds. Because of the research that's being done which is so exciting and so far very encouraging we're redefining these same molecules as agents of healing. That's a big leap and the public is coming along fairly quickly but still last night there was somebody at an--

I was speaking in Brooklyn and someone who got up and said, "Wait, aren't these the same substances that caused people to jump out of windows?" Those were things that did happen on a probably a couple of occasions in the '60s and yes but there are also substances that keep people from committing suicide. We're having very good luck researching psychedelics specifically psilocybin and MDMA as treatments for depression and OCD obsessive-compulsive disorder and addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder.

As this research emerges, government policy is going to change and psilocybin and MDMA are going to be approved by the FDA as psychiatric medicines. That's going to force us to complicate our understanding of these drugs and I think in a good way. The challenge I think for our society is figuring out the best way to approach each drug on its own terms. You simply can't mix up opiates and psychedelics in cannabis. The only thing they have in common is they're illegal. Beyond that the experience is different.

The risk profile is different. I think for each of these drugs the cultural project is to figure out how best to use them. They are tools nothing more or less and they're each going to probably require their own regime. The fact that I can go into a shop and buy cannabis in California that seems to not have rocked our world. It seems to be okay as a way to do it but I would not want to see psilocybin mushrooms showing up in the same shops being sold with the same lack of rules and rules of the road.

It's a much more consequential experience and we're going to have to find a different container legal and cultural. That's one of the reasons I wanted to look at indigenous cultures because they have more experience than we have dealing with psychedelics and they've figured it out. They never use them alone. They never use them casually. It's always with a real intention. It's always surrounded by ritual which I think is really important when it comes to drugs. I think people who use drugs in a ritual way are much less likely to get in trouble with them even things like alcohol.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Michael Pollan is author of This is Your Mind on Plants out now in paperback, co-founder of the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, and host of the new Netflix series, How to Change Your Mind. Thanks so much for joining us, Michael.

Michael Pollan: Oh thank you, Melissa. It was a pleasure.

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