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Michael Pollan
Author Michael Pollan says in his new bestseller, This Is Your Mind On Plants, that he voluntarily removed a section of his famous 1997 Harper’s article on growing opium poppies after a lawyer advised him to this effect, based on the U.S. government’s 1979 prosecution of The Progressive.
If so, he appears to have gotten the lesson wrong.
Pollan’s ninth book explores humans’ relationship with the plants that produce opium, caffeine, and mescaline. The first section, about opium, is mostly a re-publication of Pollan’s 1997 Harper’s article, “Opium Made Easy,” which notes that ordinary garden poppies including Papaver somniferum can be cultivated to produce a mildly narcotic tea. People who grow it with this purpose in mind are breaking the law. It’s literally the thought that counts.
Michael Pollan is a great writer, and This Is Your Mind on Plants is another in his series of great books. But his latest conveys a remarkably timid disposition toward tangling with the government over its objectively foolish policies.
“[W]hether or not the opium poppies in your garden are licit depends not on what you do, or even intend to do, but what you know about them,” Pollan writes. “[T]he more I learned about poppies, the guiltier my poppies became.”
There is one big difference between the article that ran nearly a quarter century ago in Harper’s and the one that appears in Pollan’s book: The book contains several pages that were cut from the original piece. They are the pages that describe how Pollan brewed a tea with the poppies he’d grown and drank it, relating the experience for his readers. It’s an approach similar to those he would later take with cannabis in The Botany of Desire (2001), various psychotropic drugs in How to Change Your Mind (2018), and mescaline for This Is Your Mind on Plants. (Pollan jokes in a footnote about how readers of his oeuvre might get a “chuckle” out of his self-identification in the 1997 Harper’s article as “a homeowner whose drug-taking days are behind him.”)
Pollan, throughout the article-turned-book-chapter, obsesses on his potential legal jeopardy in growing poppies while knowing full well that they had narcotic properties. He even has a nightmare about being raided, from which he wakes up in “bed clothes drenched with perspiration.” (Pollan, in setting up the reprint of his piece, allows that it now “feels overwrought in places.”)
But as absurd as it seems, Pollan’s concern was not unfounded. His Harper’s article tells the story of a man whom he gets to know named Jim Hogshire, who faced felony charges for growing poppies. Hogshire had written a 1994 book, Opium for the Masses, which tells people how easily they can grow poppies and cultivate the seed pods. One of the officers who raided his home and caused him to become homeless, is said to have told Hogshire, “With what you write, weren’t you expecting this?”
Michael Pollan is a great writer, and This Is Your Mind on Plants is another in his series of great books. (And yes, I have read them all.) But his latest conveys a remarkably timid disposition toward tangling with the government over its objectively foolish policies. (While agents of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency were quietly threatening seed companies to stop selling opium poppies, the drug maker Perdue Pharma was peddling its legal drug OxyContin, which would kill hundreds of thousands of people.)
Concerned about potential consequences, Pollan consulted a criminal defense lawyer whom he says regarded his article as “a bonfire of self-incrimination” and discouraged publication. He says John “Rick” MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s, responded indignantly, advising him to find a different lawyer.
MacArthur did this for him, hiring a noted First Amendment lawyer named Victor Kovner, who was eager to defend the magazine’s right to publish the piece. “I don’t recall [Kovner’s] exact words, but what I heard was: This piece must be published for the good of the republic!” Pollan relates. “Together Kovner and MacArthur made me feel like my concerns—for my liberty! for my home!—were parochial when set against the public interest at stake.”
Kovner, Pollan says, considered it “unlikely that the government would come after a magazine as well-known and venerable as Harper’s.” But, just to be sure, Pollan pressed MacArthur to draft “one of the most unusual contracts ever given to any writer by a publisher.” Harper’s pledged to indemnify Pollan from any financial harm related to the story; pay any costs for his defense as well as pay him for any time he spent defending himself; pay a salary to his wife if he were to be incarcerated; and buy him a new home should his be seized.
But even this was not enough for Pollan. He asked Kovner “whether there was anything [else] I could do to protect myself.” He says the lawyer “suggested there were two passages in the piece that were most likely to antagonize the government, and if I could live without them, it might reduce the likelihood of prosecution.”
The Progressive magazine's "The H-Bomb Secret" issue from 1979.
“As I recall,” Pollan continued, Kovner “cited the United States v. Progressive, Inc., a 1979 case in which the government had sought to stop The Progressive magazine from publishing an article containing instructions for making a hydrogen bomb.”
Pollan’s synopsis is misleading, at best. The article by freelance writer Howard Morland did not provide instructions on how to build a H-bomb, a task which requires vast financial and technological resources; it disclosed a key component of H-bomb design, as a way to expose the myths underlying the U.S. government’s regime of nuclear secrecy.
Extrapolating from The Progressive’s example, Pollan writes: “By publishing a recipe for making poppy tea, and then describing its effects in generally positive terms, I would be seen as taunting the government as well as educating would-be opium growers.” Kovner advised that removing the pages that explained how he made the tea and sampled the result “minimized the risk, he felt, since the article would then, in effect, be serving the DEA’s purpose: intimidating people like me from divulging the recipe for poppy tea and describing its effects.” That last sentence is worth reading twice.
And so Pollan and Harper’s agreed to cut this section, which he later recovered with difficulty from an old floppy disc; it appears for the first time in This Is Your Mind on Plants.
Even shorn of its illuminating sojourn into illicit drug use, the article as published in the magazine’s April 1997 issue drew wide attention. I recall at the time receiving a press release about it from Harper’s that included a packet of forbidden poppy seeds.
In the end, no one kicked in Pollan’s door or confiscated his home, which is a good thing. Whether Pollan’s acquiescence to the perceived wishes of the government is responsible for that remains an open question.
On the surface, the parallels between “Opium Made Easy” in Harper’s and “The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It, Why We’re Telling It” in The Progressive seem apparent. In 2009, when I interviewed Pollan in 2009 for the Madison, Wisconsin, weekly Isthmus for a long article on his work, I called his Harper’s expose “one of the most subversive articles in the history of American journalism” because it, like “The Progressive magazine’s H-bomb article of 1979, revealed a secret the U.S. government desperately wanted to keep.”
But what Pollan reveals in his new book is that he did everything he could to appease the government and stay out of trouble, even though, as he says, both Kovner and MacArthur “seemed eager for a fight.”
MacArthur, in a Publisher's Note in Harper's in July, takes issue with Pollan's account, writing: "While it’s true that Kovner did discuss various tactical and legal options with Michael, my recollection is that Victor was strongly and consistently in favor of publishing the piece in its entirety, which was certainly what the editor, Lewis Lapham, and I preferred and were urging Michael to do. Both Victor and I believed Michael’s fear of prosecution and arrest were greatly exaggerated, being confident that as a reporter he was protected by First Amendment guarantees."
MacArthur goes on to say that the reference to The Progressive case is "disingenuous and incorrect. The two cases are not comparable: the government had sought and won an injunction against The Progressive to prevent publication of the piece, so that the Constitutional issue at stake was whether the government backed by a judge could impose 'prior restraint' against a magazine as it did with the New York Times when the newspaper wanted to publish the Pentagon Papers. . . . With the Pollan article, there was never any question of pre-publication censorship by the government, only a concern about criminal prosecution."
MacArthur also says that Pollan's insistence on removing the pages was "a bitter blow to me, because I have always put the freedom to publish in the forefront of my work, and I lost some respect for Pollan after that."
Pollan provided The Progressive with a comment he earlier gave to The Washington Post: "Rick and I have different recollections of exactly what happened in 1997," it said. "However, I did refresh mine by speaking to Victor Kovner last fall, and feel confident of my version of events. As I detail in ‘This Is Your Mind on Plants,’ a second lawyer, also hired by the magazine, advised me against publishing the piece at all. I don't dispute Rick’s contention that I was ‘frightened’ to publish the article in toto—I was, and with good reason. The police were arresting people for doing what I admitted to doing: growing opium poppies in my garden with intent. I was a freelance writer at the time and had not only my liberty but the welfare of my family to consider.”
In fact, Pollan and Harper’s did exactly what The Progressive did not do. Rather than alter its article to suit the government, The Progressive refused to change a word. And, as Pollan notes in his book, “The government eventually dropped the case [against The Progressive] after much of the information contained in the piece had become public.”
In Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, a book published earlier this year, historian Alex Wellerstein reconstructs The Progressive’s case. He notes that when the U.S. Department of Energy asked the magazine to cease plans to publish the article because it contained what was considered restricted data, it “anticipated that The Progressive would acquiesce, as many a publication had in the past.”
“In hindsight,” Wellerstein deadpans, “it is clear the DOE misjudged The Progressive.”
The Progressive fought the government and won. Pollan and Harper’s did what they could to avoid a fight, even at the cost of producing a less compelling account. The Progressive, at least, is proud of its choice.
Editor's note: This article was revised shortly after publication to correct a typo and include the comments from MacArthur's "Publishers' Note" and Pollan's repurposed response.