YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Pollan

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2021-06-30
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2021-06-30
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  1. “If you're getting a little tired and you'd like to go to bed or have dinner, it's like, can we stop this now? Is this enough? And I think that makes it very hard in a research context where you need a therapist present and, you know, 14 hours is two shifts, right, for the therapist. So it hasn't been used, although there are plans to use it in therapy. And I think it has potential. I think it has particular potential in group therapy since there is this ability to talk and that you might be able to administer in a group, which would help. But I also think.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Was no ego dissolution. There were no hallucinations, really. It's this here and now drug in a way I wasn't prepared for. So it has different quality. Also, you can hold a conversation much more easily. You're not chemically mescaline is closer to MDMA than it is to LSD. It's a phenylethamine. So it has that kind of warmth and sometimes chattiness and heart opening quality that MDMA has compared to, as I think of psilocybin and LSD is a very solitary endeavor, you know, somewhere you're going deep into your head. So it had a very different quality. An interesting question is, so why isn't it used in research? And this points to another difference. It is a very long trip. It can be like 14 hours, longer than LSD. And if you're really enjoying it, it is the most generous of psychedelics.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “And it made him think about folds of cloth and botticelli's paintings. And it just makes the present richer, deeper. And, you know, he uses this metaphor of the reducing valve that he argues that most of consciousness is editing reality, keeping things from us because we would be overwhelmed if we took in all the sensory information available to us at any one time. We just couldn't process it. Well, on mescaline, those valves open really wide. And the sensory information is so intense. The colors are, you just see nuances of green or blue in nature or blue in the water that you've never seen before. And you can stare at the most common object and find it absolutely fascinating and understand it in a deeper way.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “After I had used, you know, gone through the menu of psychedelics in my research, and I realized, oh, this is very specific. This is not like LSD or psilocybin in this quality. The masculine experience, as described by him, and I can confirm this based on my own experience, although my own experience was probably influenced by him, it doesn't take you out of this world to another world, as people say talk about DMT, you know, taking you to another dimension of existence. It takes you deeper into this world. Huxley describes being able to...”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “You may not have read this book, but what you saw and happened to you on psychedelics, he wrote in part, because that's the way culture works, because we're looking for a vocabulary and names for what's happening to us. And we take them from literature, even indirectly. Anyway, when I read that, I thought it was an account of the ER psychedelic experience, you know, that this stood for LSD experience. It stood for psilocybin experience. And that's how I took it. And a lot of people take it that way. But then I read it again.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Well, it has a different phenomenology as the philosophers say. The experience has a very different quality. And I was very surprised to discover that. I had read Aldous Huxley's Dorser Perception when I was working on how to change your mind. And before I had used a psychedelic, it's a wonderful essay. I encourage everybody to look at it. It's the first trip report, really. And it's influenced everybody's trip since then.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Know in the tank already, right? They were sold on psychedelics, they were users of psychedelics, they were believers. And those are not the people you want to tell your story ever And I was skeptical, and I had one foot out and one foot in, I was terrified of using psychedelics before I started. I hadn't used them at the age appropriate time. So in some ways, I was the right messenger because I was more like the average reader than most people who would write about psychedelics. And that, you know, finding as a writer, finding where you stand, who you are in the story you're telling is everything in terms of getting people to come with you on the journey.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “A really good story. And all I did was amplify that story and find a way to talk about it that made it much more sympathetic, I think, than it was. I mean, most of the people writing about psychedelics before I did it were.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “So we should, you know, take heart in the fact that when you tell the story in the right way, when you have good research, because the gay marriage story was like, oh, these people want what we have, not they want to be different. They want this basic human institution called marriage. And that tells a very different story about homosexuality than was in a lot of people's heads. It was a brilliant thing to focus on. It seemed crazy at the time. I know a lot of activists thought that was a risky move and asking for the sky, but it wasn't. It was exactly the right move, as was the move of starting with cancer patients. Roland Griffiths and the team at NYU, we're going to use psychedelics to help people who are dying. How can you be against that? And the fact that it worked opened up this research into depression and anxiety and obsession because they were telling.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “And it's important for people to keep that in mind. When we get discouraged about politics and change all the time. And the model that has always struck me is gay marriage. I mean, how that went from, in the course of just the Obama administration, from something that a national politician couldn't touch to one that he had to touch. And the culture changed around gay marriage so quickly.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “So now this research is in the top tier journals. And so the respectability, the other measure of acceptance that has really struck me is all these universities starting psychedelic research centers that Harvard is starting one at Mass General. I took as particularly surprising. I remember a few years ago having lunch with a young psychiatrist at MGH who was fascinated by psychedelics and we had lunch. And he was very eager to start something in Harvard. And I said, well, I'm afraid Harvard's going to be the last place to do this because of the Timothy Leary embarrassment as the Harvard people think of it. But I was wrong. They're doing it too. And they've got a very interesting center getting started. And Yale has a center and now Berkeley has a center that I'm involved with. And the stigma is washing off. It's wonderful to see.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Now they're in New England Journal of Medicine, Robin's Last Depression study. And the map study was in, what was it, Nature Medicine? I forget.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Tools are lousy, and so the prospect of acquiring new tools to deal with a growing mental health crisis is attractive to just about everyone. There is at least curiosity and openness, and in many other cases support. So I think it's a measure of desperation as much as anything. And then the media too has been so friendly. I mean, there was a cover story in the Times two weeks ago, three weeks ago, that how psychedogens are going to revolutionize psychiatry. And that's probably what Francis Collins is responding to. And that has to do, and that piece was inspired by the phase three MDMA trial that Maps brought out, as well as Robin Carhart Harris's depression trial. Psychedelic research used to end up in journals you've never heard about. I mean, that first study that Hopkins and NYU did about existential distress was in the Journal of Neuropharmacology or something, or psychopharmacology, you know, pretty small journal based in England.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “The people who practice it, the psychiatrist and the therapists and psychologists know that they don't have very good tools. They have no tools that cure anything. At the best, they can alleviate symptoms. But the drugs they have to alleviate symptoms are pretty lousy and people don't like taking them. And they're addictive, in effect. You can't get off SSRIs very easily. And people put on weight and they lose their sex drive. And it's a, you know,”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “You're a long term visionary, no one will know what the fuck you're talking about. And you will not sell any books or articles, but you want to just see around one corner. And I've always kept that in mind. But I have to say that with regard to psychedelics, it's happened much faster than I imagined. I just see any opposition kind of melting away. And that I didn't expect. I expected a lot of pushback how to change your mind came out from the psychiatric establishment and from mainstream media because there was so much baggage surrounding psychedelics in our culture going back to the 1960s. But there wasn't. And that, I think, is really interesting. And the reason there wasn't, and I didn't understand this till later, I think we talked about this last time, is that mental health care is in crisis.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “And that the culture might be ready to hear this. And I had a mentor in publishing many years ago who said that as journalists, the goal is to be a short-term visionary.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “You know, it has been remarkable what we've seen in the last three years. And, you know, I'm sure the book played a role, but also the research. The research is panning out. When I wrote that book, a lot of it hadn't been published yet. I knew from talking to the researchers what was coming. And the publications have done a lot to move the conversation along because we have some very good evidence that these work for the various indications you're talking about. And we'll have evidence of other indications. It's valued other indications too. But culture does change, and it can change really quickly. I used to write a lot about food and agriculture. And that conversation, you know, changed. And, you know, there are a lot of people who give me credit in both cases, which is very nice. But as journalists, you know, I think we kind of have a, if we have any talent, it's that we have a sense of where the culture is moving.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Are morphine surgery would not be bearable without opiates. And the passage from this life would be much more painful for people without morphine. So this is, you know, like a lot of drugs, opiates are a blessing and a curse. And we need to be able to hold both those ideas in our head at the same time. As the Greeks did, you know, they called drugs pharmacon. And that meant literally, you know, they were both a blessing and a curse, depending on how they were used, a poison and an ally.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Neither is true. We've demonstrated the medical utility of psychedelics. And to a lesser extent, actually, the medical utility of cannabis. And neither are addictive. Yet there they are. So this schedule is an artifact of politics. No public health authorities would agree with that schedule. And opiates are two or three, scheduled two or three, because they do have a legitimate medical use. And we should remember even in the midst of the opiate crisis what a blessing.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “So, I wanted to just highlight it's not totally arbitrary. You're right to catch yourself there in that we tend to criminalize the drugs used by populations that make the establishment uncomfortable, immigrants and the poor and African Americans. But in terms of the schedule too, I mean, what's, you know, I mean, cannabis is still on schedule one. And so our psychedelics, this means that the drug has no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Move it. He made the best Applejack in town. But this was a crime, and he was committing it on his property, not hurting anybody, but potentially himself. And in those years, when he was making Applejack, opium was legal and it was in patent medicines all over America. And in fact, we have evidence that the women's Christian temperance union and those women who were fighting alcohol were consuming opium because they would use these patent medicines and cannabis, which was also in patent medicines. So it was a complete reversal of the current situation where alcohol is legal and opium and cannabis were illegal.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “All the time. And in fact, the government would put methanol in various over-the-counter, I forget where they were putting it, but they were using methanol to contaminate sources of alcohol so people wouldn't drink them. And they did drink them. And so the idea that a drug war contributes to public health, and then you have dirty needles and the spread of AIDS, it doesn't contribute to public health. It does the opposite effect. But there are lots of examples of why is this legal and why isn't that? And in the end, it comes back to, I mean, I tell the story in the piece of the person that lived on my land before I bought it. It was a farmer named Joe Matches. And he was known. There were old apple trees on the property, these wonderful cider apple trees. And he made hard cider during Prohibition. And he was known for having the best is basically hard cider that you freeze to get the alcohol fraction and rumour.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “In general, you know, the war on drugs is won by the drugs. They keep flourishing, telling people you can't have them does not stop. It just makes them more dangerous. I mean, your friend who died of a fentanyl overdose, I don't know the details, but that's probably a product of the drug war because there's no regulation of what's in street heroin. And also a lot of people die from fentanyl overdoses because often after they've broken their addiction, if people go through withdrawal and then slip and they don't realize that their tolerance has changed dramatically. They're back to baseline where the drug has a much bigger effect than it does after you're addicted. So there are many people have fentanyl overdoses for that reason. But point is it's about information and it's about regulation and an illegal drug market is going to lead to lots of accidental deaths. I mean, this happened during prohibition. You know, people died from bad hooch.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Determined, no, if you go through it, you can find there's no rational reason. I mean, if you worry about drugs as addictiveness, then cigarettes should be illegal. Nicotine should be illegal. And caffeine should be illegal. Highly addictive substances that, you know, people fairly quickly become dependent on. If your concern is about toxicity, yes, you look at things like Datura. If your concern is just public health in general, you look at alcohol. You know, alcohol and tobacco are much more dangerous than any of the drugs we've criminalized. Now, we realized it was a folly to criminalize alcohol doesn't work as it hasn't worked with drugs.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “I asked Lewis Lapham, who was the editor. Instead of a raise this year, will you assign me an article? I wanted to get published in Harper's magazine. And I'd been an editor there for a couple years. And he was delighted to do that instead of having to fight with Rick about money. That assignment was my first garden essay. So I have Rick's cheapness to thank for my writing career.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “He was hoping I would get arrested. This would put Harper's on the map. This would be a giant case. He would take it to the Supreme Court and he would. He has bottomless pockets. And publishing for him is kind of an avocation. He was always looking for the big story that Harper's would get involved with. I mean, we saw that just last year with the Harper's letter around free speech versus the efforts to curb free speech in the name of various woke values. He's not afraid of controversy. I mean, you shouldn't think of him as publisher. He's not a bean counter. Although I should say he's incredibly cheap as a publisher with his employees. But with issues like this, he's incredibly generous. So this is a guy I was lucky to get a 1% raise every year from because I worked there as an editor first and fighting in many ways my writing career began because I couldn't get a raise at Harper's.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “No, he didn't. I mean, he was a crusading publisher, like a crusading journalist. And I shouldn't speak for him, but my guess is he was hoping something would happen.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Was looking the wrong way. I just thought that that irony was so telling that it was time to take another look. So the piece now is republished in its entirety, but also there's a shell I built around it about what life was like in that moment and what was going on with Purdue Pharma.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “So, I found a computer wizard in a neighboring town. He said, Let me see what I've got in my basement. And he found a zip drive. And he was able to get the file off it and sent it to me. But it's an early Microsoft Words file that current Microsoft Word can't read. So then I had to find a piece of software. And there is something called Libra Office, which will read any Microsoft file from any era. It's free software. And there it was. And it popped up on my screen one day. I was able to restore it. So that was one reason to publish it, to restore those pages. And I was happy to be able to do that and share the recipe and the trip report with people. But the other was learning later what was going on at the same moment. The same summer that the DEA was going around terrifying florists and nurseries. Purdue farmer was introducing OxyCon and the real opioid crisis was beginning.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Were hard, they weren't actually floppy. And on the outside, it had a list of contents, and one was poppy draft. And I said, oh, I've got it. It's here. But I don't have anything to read of zip drive, do you? I mean, those are like obsolete media.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “My computer, I just kind of cleansed everything of these 7,000 words or 5,000 words. I forget how much it was. I realized I now had an opportunity to publish it the way I wanted it. And so I went looking for the missing pages. And my brother-in-law said, I think I came back to you a few years ago. And I searched my house in Connecticut, which we still own and hidden away in this closet. I found this lawyer's brief container, you know, with the rubber band around it. And in there was a purple floppy drive. I don't know if you remember zip drives from the late 90s.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Nothing happened. The piece comes out. I mean, Victor calculated they wouldn't want to go after a well-funded magazine and they would look really stupid doing it. And unlike Jim Hawkshire, they left me alone. And that's because I had the protection of a reputable publication. So I've always wanted to publish the piece the way it was written. And this is another wrinkle. It's hard to recreate the paranoia of 1996-97 around drugs. It was a very different moment. They were busting lots of people. They were 1.1 million arrests in 96 for drug crimes. And they were filling the prisons with people who had done things like I had done. So I got the offending pages off the property. I just said, I have a brother-in-law who's a lawyer. And I said, could you just take these to your office or in your safe or wherever? You know, I just don't want them around. And I got them off.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “If you get arrested, we will not only defend you, we will pay your wife a salary for the whole amount of time it takes for you to defend yourself and if necessary serve your sentence. And if they take your house, we'll buy you a comparable new one. So I was completely indemnified, but still terrified. And that's what we did, and we published it, and it was a cover story in 1997 called Opium Made Easy.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Eventually, he says, Well, you could make it less antagonistic to the government by removing two pieces, two sections. One is your recipe where you describe how you make poppy tea. And the other is what we would call the trip report, where you describe the effects. He said, this is particularly antagonistic to the government given their interests. If you take those two sections out, I think your risk is not nil, but it's negligible. I still wasn't ready to publish because I still heard that other lawyer in my ears. So I asked Rick if he would protect me, Rick MacArthur, the publisher. And he had Victor draw up a contract, the likes of which no writer has ever seen, in which he says.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “And so he hires a very prominent First Amendment lawyer in New York named Victor Kovner, who represented the nation and a bunch of magazines and is one of the big voices in that world. And Victor reads the article and says, in effect, you must publish this article for the good of the Republic. This is what the First Amendment exists for. This is critical commentary on the drug war. And I'm like, really? But what about the jailing and the loss of my house?”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Know because of some gardening crime I committed was amazing. And so I thought, well, that's it. Years work down the drain. I was a freelance writer. I was counting on that paycheck. When the publisher of Harper's, who is a man named Rick MacArthur, very wealthy man who kind of keeps the magazine afloat, he's descended from the MacArthur's of MacArthur Foundation. He's a champion of the First Amendment. When he hears that this lawyer has advised against publication, his immediate response is, we need a new lawyer.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Reasonable doubt. It's, I forget what the one there's one standard below that, but it's not a very high standard. So there are many cases where even though you had a son or daughter who was growing marijuana in your backyard, even if you didn't know about it, your backyard could be guilty of a drug crime and it could be forfeited. And these laws stand. They're absolutely outrageous. And so they could take your house and basically wreck your life. And my wife and I are like turning white. I mean, first of all, that we have a criminal defense lawyer in our living room.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Harper's magazine, the publisher. I say, please, we have to get this piece lawyered before we publish it. And he said, Oh, I've got a friend who's a criminal defense lawyer in Bridgeport where there's a lot of crime to be defended. And this guy reads the piece, drives up to our house in Cornwall. My son, who's four at the time, is often daycare. And the lawyer and his youngest associates sit us down and say, well, you can't publish this piece. This is a confession. On the basis of this piece and nothing more, they could arrest you on charges of manufacturing narcotics and possession of narcotics. They could also take your house away under the asset forfeiture laws, which are still in effect. They've been diluted somewhat, but they're still in effect. If a piece of property or a car is involved in the commission of a drug crime, the police may seize it. And the standard of proof is not beyond a”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “To my editor, look, we have to get this piece lawyered because I'm confessing to a federal crime here because I did describe not just growing the opium poppies, but making poppy tea and something called Laudenum, which is how opium was used in the 19th century. Basically, you dissolve the poppyheads in alcohol. So all you do is crush them and put them in vodka. And that makes a much stronger. I learned from a USDA ethnobotanist that, yeah, if you really want to get a strong opium hit, dissolve it in alcohol, not, you know, not water. But Jim didn't include that because he was a Muslim and he doesn't drink. So the lawyer, so they sent it to a very prominent criminal defense lawyer in the state of Connecticut.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “And I did learn that there was this quiet crackdown going on all across America, led by the DEA, who probably alerted by Jim's book, wanted to make sure this didn't become a fad because the myth had been spread that you couldn't grow opium poppies in America, that it had to be turkey or Afghanistan. And that simply wasn't true. It was a cash crop for many people in the South for many years. And it turns out there was this crackdown going on, that DE agents were visiting florist shops to tell them to stop carrying dried poppy heads. They were calling seed companies, telling them to remove them, even though they were perfectly legal. You know, it was a tense summer for me. In the end, I wrote an article about my experience and about Jim Hawkshire. I submitted it to Harper's Magazine, who had commissioned it. It was a long piece. I'd worked on it for a year. It was like 15,000 words.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “And I'm trying to determine how risky my little crop of poppies are. And so I start reporting and I start calling DEA agents and the locals police. And I say, you know, and asking them questions about it. So I want to grow some Papaverse omniferum. And is it okay? And they would say, well, yeah, if it's just for scenery looks, as one put it to me. And I said, well, what if?”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “No plausible deniability. They've lost it because if they, you know, if there's any record that they heard this podcast and they're growing opium poppies, they are at some risk. The risk was a lot greater in the 90s at the height of the drug war, I might say. So suddenly when I hear he's been arrested and he is in jail and his wife is in jail. I'm like, oh shit, I've got this paper trail or this digital trail between him and me because we're exchanging email and they, I'm sure, seized his computer. Now what do I do? Do I rip these things out? And thus began this summer of like fear and loathing as he's going through the court process.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “So it turns out that it's perfectly legal to grow opium poppies, possess the seeds, and grow the poppies unless you have knowledge that you are growing a scheduled substance, in which case the same act miraculously gets turned into a federal crime of manufacturing narcotics that carries a five to 20 year sentence. All your listeners have now just endangered millions of people.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Flora shop because they look beautiful in arrangement. And his book. His book proves his intent to take those poppy seeds and make a narcotic with it.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “For taking the set, lifting the set. So, I thought, well, you know, this I get a column out of this. This could be kind of fun. So I ordered some seeds and I start communicating with Hogshire. I got a hold of his email and asking some questions. And did he have any seeds he could spare? And we're going back and forth. And then suddenly I get a call from my friend Paul, who I don't know how he had this information, that Jim has been arrested and charged with manufacturing narcotics. The only evidence the police have, this happens in Seattle, they bust into his apartment. They bring a SWAT team, you know, 20 guys with guns and, you know, ninja suits. And this guy is sitting there with his wife and they bust in and throw him up against the wall. What do they get him with? He's got a bunch of dried poppies from the florist shop. Okay. You've seen these flowerheads in every floor.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Pure and simple. And it dries brown and you can roll it off and you have opium. Now, you need a few thousand of those pods to get a usable amount of opium. If you do it that way, and it's a lot of work, and that's one of the reasons it's grown in places with very cheap child labor who can go through fields slitting every pot, but it grows just as well in your garden. Anyway, he was explaining all this, which I didn't know. And he was saying a much better way to use it is to make a tea from the poppy seed heads and just let them dry, put them in a coffee mill or grinder somehow and soak them in hot water. And you'll have this tea. And in fact, this tea is drunk in the Arab world during funerals and as a mild painkiller. You know, it's not a big experience, but it's a very mild narcotic for taking their way.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Okay, it does sound scary, I guess. It means growing poppies, pop of our somniferum, which is an annual poppy. You can buy the seeds at a garden center. You can order them online. You can scrape them off a poppy seed bagel. Those are poppy seeds. And they grow this plant, this beautiful plant with paper thin petals and this beautiful seed pot after the petals fall off and this gorgeous lettuce-like leaves. When the petals drop and that seed pod forms and it looks like a piece of sculpture, if you slit that green skin of that seed pod with your fingernail or with a blade and wait 60 seconds, you will see this white latexy looking sap emerge, leak out of it, bleed from it. That is opium.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Yeah, so this story about growing my own opium began with an editor friend sending me an underground press book called Opium for the Masses. I was writing columns about my garden, the pieces that became Second Nature. And my editor, a fellow Austinite named Paul Tuff, said, hey, this book is like up your alley. And he sends me opium for the masses and I read it. It was like, this is so cool. I can grow my own opium, you know, and like most gardeners, I just want to see if I can do it. You know, I wasn't interested in consuming opium.”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “So aggressively and convince the medical establishment that pain was being undermedicated and that this was a safer non-addictive opiate when they knew precisely the opposite. This has come out in court cases. So the biggest public health crisis during the period of the drug war involved legal drugs, not illegal drugs. So, you know, the government was looking at the wrong problem. And the FDA had approved OxyCotton. And yes, many people who began with legal opiates, like most heroin users, eventually transition because they can't get access to legal opiates and then they transition to street drugs and then bump into things like fentanyl and the likelihood or possibility of overdose. But I think nothing points up the absurdity of the drug war. Then the two things that were happening in the year 1996 that”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “In 1970, they're his motives. He needs to criminalize these two troublesome populations. The other is the fact that while we were fighting this drug war, which reaches really its peak in the Clinton administration, you know, whatever you think about Clinton, his crime bill led to mandatory minimum sentences and led to mass incarceration. The drug war was being fought with particular vigor during the 90s. And it was all part of Clinton's triangulating to the right. And this is part of the story I tell in the opium chapter is that while the DEA and other authorities were going after small-time drug dealers and individuals even trying to grow a little opium for themselves, Purdue Pharma was introducing in 1996 OxyCotton and leading to eventually the opiate crisis because they marketed opiates”

    2021-06-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #520: Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT