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The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World
Citation (Chicago Style): Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. Random House Publishing Group, 2001. Kindle edition.
Introduction
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All those plants care about is what every being cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself.
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Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.
Chapter 1
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Apples were something people drank. The reason people in Brilliant wanted John Chapman to stay and plant a nursery was the same reason he would soon be welcome in every cabin in Ohio: Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.
Chapter 3
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These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.
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(ethnobotanists call them “entheogens,” meaning “the god within”)
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The literary critic David Lenson, for one, believes it was crucial. He argues that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the imagination as a mental faculty that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create,” an idea whose reverberations in Western culture haven’t yet been stilled, simply cannot be understood without reference to the change in consciousness wrought by opium.
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‘dissolution, diffusion and dissipation’
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One of the things certain drugs do to our perceptions is to distance or estrange the objects around us, aestheticizing the most commonplace things until they appear as ideal versions of themselves. Under the spell of cannabis “every object stands more clearly for all of its class,” as David Lenson writes in On Drugs. “A cup ‘looks like’ the Platonic Idea of a cup, a landscape looks like a landscape painting, a hamburger stands for all the trillions of hamburgers ever served, and so forth.” A psychoactive plant can open a door onto a world of archetypal forms,
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Allen Ginsberg suggested that the negative feelings marijuana sometimes provokes, such as anxiety, fear, and paranoia, are “traceable to the effects on consciousness not of the narcotic but of the law.”
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Taking account of this phenomenon, Andrew Weil describes marijuana as an “active placebo.”
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In 1988 Allyn Howlett, a researcher at the St. Louis University Medical School, discovered a specific receptor for THC in the brain—a type of nerve cell that THC binds to like a molecular key in a lock, causing it to activate.
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The cannabinoid receptors Howlett found showed up in vast numbers all over the brain (as well as in the immune and reproductive systems), though they were clustered in regions responsible for the mental processes that marijuana is known to alter: the cerebral cortex (the locus of higher-order thought), the hippocampus (memory), the basal ganglia (movement), and the amygdala (emotions). Curiously, the one neurological address where cannabinoid receptors didn’t show up was in the brain stem, which regulates involuntary functions such as circulation and respiration.
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Raphael Mechoulam (working with a collaborator, William Devane) found it: the brain’s own endogenous cannabinoid. He named it “anandamide,” from the Sanskrit word for “inner bliss.”
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some of the various direct and indirect effects of cannabinoids: pain relief, loss of short-term memory, sedation, and mild cognitive impairment.
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The purpose of THC could be to protect cannabis plants from ultraviolet radiation; it seems that the higher the altitude at which cannabis grows, the more THC it produces. THC also exhibits antibiotic properties, suggesting a role in protecting cannabis from disease. Last, it’s possible that THC gives the cannabis plant a sophisticated defense against pests. Cannabinoid receptors have been found in animals as primitive as the hydra, and researchers expect to find them in insects. Conceivably, cannabis produces THC to discombobulate the insects (and higher herbivores) that prey on the plant; it might make a bug (or a buck or a rabbit) forget what it’s doing or where in the world it last saw that tasty plant.
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Ma, the ancient Chinese character for “hemp,” depicts a male and a female plant under a roof—cannabis inside the house of human culture.
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Cognitive dysfunction?
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The scientists I spoke to were unanimous in citing short-term memory loss as one of the key neurological effects of the cannabinoids.
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All talk about the difficulty of reconstructing what happened mere seconds ago and what a Herculean challenge it becomes to follow the thread of a conversation (or a passage of prose) when one’s short-term memory isn’t operating normally.
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Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn’t quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember.
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“If we could hear the squirrel’s heartbeat, the sound of the grass growing, we should die of that roar,” George Eliot once wrote.
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The first part of Nietzsche’s essay is a moving and occasionally hilarious paean to the virtues of forgetting, which he maintains is a prerequisite to human happiness, mental health, and action.
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Like the American transcendentalists, Nietzsche believes that our personal and collective inheritance stands in the way of our enjoyment of life and accomplishment of anything original.
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My lawyer father, once complimented on his ability to see ahead three or four moves in a negotiation, explained that the reason he liked to jump to conclusions was so he could get there early and rest. I’m the same way in my negotiations with reality.
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Colors,” in classical rhetoric, are tropes.)
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Sagan, who was convinced that marijuana’s morning-after problem is not a question of self-deception so much as a failure to communicate—to put “these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.”
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Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting—on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive—it’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true—that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.
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From a brain’s point of view, the distinction between a natural and an artificial high may be meaningless.