Medicinal plants, in context

doi:10.1126/science.abi7773

GSTDTAP > 气候变化

DOI	10.1126/science.abi7773
	Medicinal plants, in context
	Kiki Sanford
	2021-07-09
发表期刊	Science
出版年	2021
英文摘要	Michael Pollan's This Is Your Mind on Plants combines the author's long-held interest in the natural world with his growing fascination with the workings of the human mind. In the book, he investigates three plant-derived compounds with vastly different stories and effects on human consciousness: the sedative opium, the stimulant caffeine, and the hallucinogen mescaline. Pollan weaves together three separately engaging stories in a pleasantly meandering style, deftly using his personal experiences with each compound as a jumping-off point for small forays into anthropology, history, politics, psychology, molecular biology, and neuroscience. Even the most distracted reader will come away with an understanding of the physical effects of the spotlighted substances as well as their cultural significance. Pollan's own garden plays a central role in the book's first section, where readers learn that he (like many other gardeners) has grown opium poppies. For Pollan, growing the gorgeous blooms inspired his current quest to learn more about medicinal plants. The book's opium chapter is both a telling and a retelling. From 1996 to 1997, Pollan worked on an article about growing the illicit flower that was eventually published in Harper's Magazine . Potentially incriminating details, including Pollan's recipe for poppy tea, were left out, however, for legal reasons. This Is Your Mind on Plants contains the unredacted article and includes a discussion of America's opiate addiction epidemic, interstitial explanations, and Pollan's present-day reflections on the experience. Did deleting some of the story's details protect Pollan from litigation? He has no way of knowing, but returning to it now leads him to reflect that “whatever the DEA was thinking in 1996 and '97, the government missed the real story about opium, as in fact did I.” The section of the book that deals with caffeine describes Pollan's struggle to go without the stimulant for several months. Many who drink coffee or tea for its reliable jolt of energy will understand the difficulty inherent in that endeavor. “The day's first cup of tea or coffee acquires most of its power— its joy! —not so much from its euphoric and stimulating properties than from the fact that it is suppressing the emerging symptoms of withdrawal,” he notes. The rest of this chapter drifts like an unfocused (uncaffeinated?) mind between Pollan's personal musings and fascinating tales from the colonialist history of England, as he relates his thesis that caffeine—for better or worse—made capitalism what it is today. The final section of the book details Pollan's interest in mescaline, another compound produced in his garden in the form of a San Pedro cactus. Here, he takes great care with his subject, as he ponders the issue of cultural appropriation with respect to this particular compound, which has long played a vital role in Indigenous American cultures. Pollan details numerous interactions with individuals from Native American tribes who are working to preserve the slow-growing peyote plant—which he also acquires during the course of his research—from which mescaline is extracted for religious rituals. Such interactions lead him to contemplate his own mission. “This puts the eating of peyote by white people in a long line of nonmetaphorical takings from Native Americans,” he writes. “I was beginning to see that, for someone like me, the act of not ingesting peyote may be the more important one.” Pollan goes on to describe his experiments with non–peyote-derived mescaline. He reports feeling like “a helpless captive of the present moment.” And, although at one point he “felt as though things could easily tip over into terror,” the sensation subsided enough to allow him to enjoy the remaining hours of intoxication. In the end, the introspective reader is left with more questions than answers—“what exactly is a drug?” for example, a question Pollan poses in the book's first paragraph but fails to answer satisfactorily. Why do we demonize the use of some plant compounds and accept others? And why do we humans seek to alter our consciousness in the first place? Pollan has crafted a narrative that he hopes will influence the stories we tell about plants, their active molecules, and the relationship we have with them as individuals and as a society. But this tome is not a self-help book. Instead of prescribing a list of potential policy actions, he ultimately leaves the details of how we might move forward with plant-derived compounds open to interpretation.
领域	气候变化 ; 资源环境
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引用统计
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/334212
专题	气候变化资源环境科学
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Kiki Sanford. Medicinal plants, in context[J]. Science,2021.
APA	Kiki Sanford.(2021).Medicinal plants, in context.Science.
MLA	Kiki Sanford."Medicinal plants, in context".Science (2021).