An Unholy Trinity: Original Sin, Capitalism and Drug Wars

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But what, you may well ask, do these three have in common?
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One of my current favorite authors, Michael Pollan, has some intriguing thoughts on their relationship which he shares in the chapter on marijuana in The Botany of Desire*.  In this snippet he's talking about Paracelsus, a sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician.  (Among his many accomplishments was the invention of laudanum, the tincture of opium that was perhaps the most important drug in the pharmacopoeia until the twentieth century.)  In the decades following Pope Innocent's fiat against witchcraft, Paracelsus set to work transforming cannabis, opium, belladonna and other "pagan potions" into healing tinctures, bottling the magic plants and calling them medicines.  Michael writes:

"Paracelsus's grand project, which arguably is still going on today, represents one of the many ways the Judeo-Christian tradition has deployed its genius to absorb, or co-opt, the power of the pagan faith it set out to uproot.  In much the same way that the new monotheism folded into its rituals the people's traditional pagan holidays and spectacles, it desperately needed to do something about their ancient devotion to magic plants.  Indeed, the story of the forbidden fruit in Genesis suggests that nothing was more important.

"The challenge these plants posed to monotheism was profound, for they threatened to divert people's gaze from the sky, where the new God resided, down to the natural world all around them.  The magic plants were, and remain, a gravitational force pulling us back to Earth, to matter, away from the there and then of Christian salvation and back to the here and now.  Indeed, what these plants do to time is perhaps the most dangerous thing about them - dangerous, that is, from the perspective of a civilization organized on the lines of Christianity and, more recently, capitalism.

"Christianity and capitalism are both probably right to detest a plant like cannabis. Both faiths bid us to set our sights on the future; both reject the pleasures of the moment and the senses in favor of the expectation of a fulfillment yet to come - whether by earning salvation or by getting and spending.  More even than most plant drugs, cannabis, by immersing us in the present and offering something like fulfillment here and now, short-circuits the metaphysics of desire on which Christianity and capitalism (and so much else in our civilization) depend.

"What, then, was the knowledge that God wanted to keep from Adam and Eve in the Garden?  Theologians will debate this question without end, but it seems to me the most important answer is hidden in plain sight.  The content of the knowledge Adam and Eve could gain by tasting of the fruit does not matter nearly as much as its form - that is, the very fact that there was spiritual knowledge of any kind to be had from a tree: from nature.  The new faith sought to break the human bond with magic nature, to disenchant the world of plants and animals by directing our attention to a single God in the sky.  Yet Jehovah couldn't very well pretend the tree of knowledge didn't exist, not when generations of plant worshiping pagans knew better.  So the pagan tree is allowed to grow even in Eden, though ringed around now with a strong taboo.  Yes, there is spiritual knowledge in nature, the new God is acknowledging, and its temptations are fierce, but I am fiercer still.  Yield to it, and you will be punished.

"So unfolds the drug war's first battle."

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*Take a peek at the book HERE or view a full-length PBS video HERE

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The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.
-  Carl Sagan
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