The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

Author:Michael Pollan [Pollan, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588360083
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

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As you can probably guess, I’ve told my marijuana-growing story more than a few times, after dinner with friends, say, and I can usually count on a few laughs. The happy ending is one reason, but the other reason the story qualifies as light comedy is that the suspense on which it hinges, while real enough, is not exactly a matter of life or death. If the police chief had spotted my plants, things would have gotten uncomfortable for me, but it was not as if I would have gone to jail. In 1982 a legal slap on the wrist, and perhaps a certain amount of personal embarrassment (What do I tell my parents? My boss?) was really about all a small-time marijuana grower had to fear. It hadn’t been many years before this misadventure, after all, that an American president—Jimmy Carter—had proposed that marijuana be decriminalized (his sons and even his drug czar smoked), and Bob Hope was telling benign jokes about doobies in prime time. Marijuana then was harmless, funny, and, it seemed to everyone, on the verge of social acceptance.

In the years since, there has been a sea change concerning cannabis in America. By the end of the decade the plant had suddenly acquired, or been endowed with, extraordinary new powers, which, among other things, rendered my story a period piece, quaint in its goofiness and not at all likely to be repeated. A couple of facts will illustrate the change: The minimum penalty for the cultivation of a kilogram of marijuana (the size of my harvest, more or less) in this state has, since 1988, been a mandatory five-year jail sentence. (Other states are harsher still: growing any amount of marijuana in Oklahoma qualifies a gardener for a life sentence.)

Jail time would not be my only worry were I so foolish as to reprise my experiment. If the New Milford police chief happened to find marijuana growing in my garden today, he would have the power to seize my house and land, regardless of whether I was ultimately convicted of a crime. That’s because, according to the somewhat magical reasoning of the federal asset-forfeiture laws, my garden can be found guilty of violating the drug laws even if I am not. The titles of proceedings brought under these laws sound rather less like exercises in American jurisprudence than medieval animism: United States v. One 1974 Cadillac Eldorado Sedan. If the police chief chose to bring such an action (The People of Connecticut v. Michael Pollan’s Garden), he’d simply have to prove that my land had been used in the commission of a crime for it to become the property of the New Milford Police Department, theirs to dispose of as they wished. So do things stand in America today that yielding to the temptation of a forbidden plant not only can get you temporarily expelled from your garden but can get your garden taken away forever.

The swiftness of this change in the weather, the

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