THE PENALTY OF POPPIES GROWN IN PUBLIC PLACES
Last season was a strange
one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet
weather—the talk of gardeners all over New England—but also for its
climate of paranoia. One flower was the cause: a tall, breathtaking
poppy, with silky scarlet petals and a black heart, the growing of
which, I discovered rather too late, is a felony under state and federal
law.
Actually, it’s not quite as
simple as that. My poppies were, or became, felonious; another
gardener’s might or might not be. The legality of growing opium poppies
(whose seeds are sold under many names, including the breadseed poppy,
Papaver paeoniflorum, and, most significantly, Papaver somniferum) is a
tangled issue, turning on questions of nomenclature and epistemology
that it took me the better part of the summer to sort out.
But before I try to
explain, let me offer a friendly warning to any gardeners who might wish
to continue growing this spectacular annual: the less you know about
it, the better off you are, in legal if not horticultural terms. Because
whether or not the opium poppies in your garden are illicit depends not
on what you do, or even intend to do, with them but very simply on what
you know about them.
Hence my warning: if you
have any desire to grow opium poppies, you would be wise to stop reading
right now.
As for me, I’m afraid that, at least in the eyes of the law, I’m already
lost, having now tasted of the forbidden fruit of poppy knowledge.
Indeed, the more I learned about poppies, the guiltier my poppies
became—and the more fearful grew my days and to some extent also my
nights. Until the day last fall, that is, when I finally pulled out my
poppies’ withered stalks and, with a tremendous feeling of relief, threw
them on the compost, thereby (I hope) rejoining the ranks of gardeners
who don’t worry about visits from the police.
It started out if not
quite innocently, then legally enough. Or at least that’s what I thought
back in February, when I added a couple of poppy varieties (P.
somniferum as well as P. paeoniflorum and P. rhoeas) to my annual order
of flowers and vegetables from the seed catalogues. But the state of
popular (and even expert) knowledge about poppies is confused, to say
the least; mis- and even disinformation is rife. I’d read in Martha
Stewart Living that “contrary to general belief, there is no federal law
against growing P. somniferum.” Before planting, I consulted my
Taylor’s Guide to Annuals, a generally reliable reference that did
allude to the fact that “the juice of the unripe pod yields opium, the
production of which is illegal in the United States.” But Taylor’s said
nothing worrisome about the plants themselves. I figured that if the
seeds could be sold legally (and I found somniferum on offer in a
half-dozen well-known catalogues, though it was not always sold under
that name), how could the obvious next step—i.e., planting the seeds
according to the directions on the packet—possibly be a federal offense?
Were this the case, you would think there’d at least be a disclaimer in
the catalogues.
So it seemed to me that I could remain safely on the sunny side of the
law just as long as I didn’t attempt to extract any opium from my
poppies. Yet I have to confess that this was a temptation I grappled
with all last summer. You see, I’d become curious as to whether it was
in fact possible, as I’d recently read, for a gardener of average skills
to obtain a narcotic from a plant grown in this country from legally
available seeds. To another gardener this will not seem odd, for we
gardeners are like that: eager to try the improbable, to see if we can’t
successfully grow an artichoke in Zone 5 or make echinacea tea from the
roots of our purple coneflowers. Deep down I suspect that many
gardeners regard themselves as minor-league alchemists, transforming the
dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value
and beauty and power. Also, one of the greatest satisfactions of
gardening is the independence it can confer—from the greengrocer, the
florist, the pharmacist, and, for some, the drug dealer. One does not
have to go all the way “back to the land” to experience the satisfaction
of providing for yourself off the grid of the national economy. So,
yes, I was curious to know if I could make opium at home, especially if I
could do so without making a single illicit purchase. It seemed to me
that this would indeed represent a particularly impressive sort of
alchemy.
I wasn’t at all sure, however, whether I was prepared to go quite that
far. I mean, opium! I’m not eighteen anymore, or in any position to
undertake such a serious risk. I am in fact forty two, a family man (as
they say) and homeowner whose drug-taking days are behind him. Not that
they aren’t sometimes fondly recalled, the prevailing cant about drug
abuse notwithstanding. But now I have a kid and a mortgage and a Keogh.
There is simply no place in my grownup, middle-class lifestyle for an
arrest on federal narcotics charges, much less for the forfeiture of my
family’s house and land, which often accompanies such an arrest. It was
one thing, I reasoned, to grow poppies; quite another to manufacture
narcotics from them. I figured I knew where the line between these two
deeds fell, and felt confident that I could safely toe it.
But in these days of the American drug war, as it turns out, the border
between the sunny country of the law-abiding—my country!—and a shadowy
realm of SWAT teams, mandatory minimum sentences, asset forfeitures, and
ruined lives is not necessarily where one thinks it is. One may even
cross it unawares. As I delved into the horticulture and jurisprudence
of the opium poppy last summer, I made the acquaintance of one man, a
contemporary and a fellow journalist, who had had his life pretty well
wrecked after stepping across that very border. In his case, though,
there is reason to believe it was the border that did the moving; he was
arrested on charges of possessing the same flowers that countless
thousands of Americans are right now growing in their gardens and
keeping in vases in their living rooms. What appears to have set him
apart was the fact that he had published a book about this flower in
which he described a simple method for converting its seedpod into a
narcotic—knowledge that the government has shown it will go to great
lengths to keep quiet. Just where this leaves me, and this article, is,
well, the subject of this article.
1.
Before recounting my own adventures among the poppies, and encounters
with the poppy police, I need to tell you a little about this
acquaintance, since he was the inspiration for my own experiments in
poppy cultivation as well as the direct cause of the first flush of my
paranoia. His name is Jim Hogshire. He first came to my attention a few
years ago, when this magazine published an excerpt from Pills-a-go-go,
one of the wittier and more informative of the countless “zines” that
sprang up in the early Nineties, when desktop publishing first made it
possible for individuals single-handedly to publish even the narrowest
of special-interest periodicals. Hogshire’s own special interest—his
passion, really—was the world of pharmaceuticals: the chemistry,
regulation, and effects of licit and illicit drugs. Published on
multicolored stock more or less whenever Hogshire got around to it,
Pills-a-go-go printed inside news about the pharmaceutical industry
alongside firsthand accounts of Hogshire’s own self-administered drug
experiments—”pill-hacking,” he called it. The zine had a strong
libertarian-populist bent, and was given to attacking the FDA, DEA, and
AMA with gusto whenever those institutions stood between the American
people and their pills—pills that Hogshire regarded with a reverence
born of their astounding powers to heal as well as to alter the course
of human history and, not incidentally, consciousness.
Hogshire’s reports on his drug experiments made for amusing reading. I
particularly remember his description, reprinted in this magazine, of
the effects of a deliberate overdose of Dextromethorphan Hydrobromide,
or DM, a common ingredient in over-the-counter cough syrups and
nighttime cold remedies. After drinking eight ounces of Robitussin DM,
Hogshire reported waking up at 4:00 A.M. and determining that he should
now shave and go to Kinko’s to get some copies made.
That may seem normal, but the fact was that I had a reptilian brain. My
whole way of thinking and perceiving had changed. . . .
I got in the shower and shaved. While I was shaving I “thought” that for
all I knew I was hacking my face to pieces. Since I didn’t see any
blood or feel any pain I didn’t worry about it. Had I looked down and
seen that I had grown another limb, I wouldn’t have been surprised at
all; I would have just used it. . . .
The world became a binary place of dark and light, on and off, safety
and danger. . . . I sat at my desk and tried to write down how this felt
so I could look at it later. I wrote down the word “Cro-Magnon.” I was
very aware that I was stupid. . . . Luckily there were only a couple of
people in Kinko’s and one of them was a friend. She confirmed that my
pupils were of different sizes. One was out of round. . . .
I knew there was no way I could know if I was correctly adhering to
social customs. I didn’t even know how to modulate my voice. Was I
talking too loud? Did I look like a regular person? I understood that I
was involved in a big contraption called civilization and that certain
things were expected of me, but I could not comprehend what the hell
those things might be. . . .
I found being a reptile kind of pleasant. I was content to sit there and
monitor my surroundings. I was alert but not anxious. Every now and
then I would do a “reality check” to make sure I wasn’t masturbating or
strangling someone, because of my vague awareness that more was expected
of me than just being a reptile—.
My interest in Hogshire’s drug journalism was mild and strictly
literary; as I’ve mentioned, my own experiments with drugs were past,
and never terribly ambitious to begin with. I’d been too terrified ever
to try hallucinogens, and my sole experience with opiates had
accompanied some unpleasant dental work. I’d grown some marijuana once
in the early Eighties, when doing so was no big deal, legally speaking.
But things are different now: growing a handful of marijuana plants
today could cost me my freedom and my house.
We may not hear as much now about the war on drugs as we did in the days
of Nancy Reagan, William Bennett, and “Just Say No.” But in fact the
drug war continues unabated; if anything, the Clinton Administration is
waging it even more intensely than its predecessors, having spent a
record $15 billion on drug enforcement last year and added federal death
penalties for so-called drug kingpins—a category defined to include
large-scale growers of marijuana. Every autumn, police helicopters
equipped with infrared sensors trace regular flight paths over the farm
fields in my corner of New England; just the other day they spotted
thirty marijuana plants tucked into a cornfield up the road from me,
less than a hundred yards, as the crow flies, from my garden. For all I
know, the helicopters peered down into my garden on their way; the
Supreme Court has recently ruled that such overflights do not constitute
an illegal search of one’s property, one of a string of recent rulings
that have strengthened the government’s hand in fighting the drug war.
Overflights and other such measures have certainly proved an effective
deterrent with me. And anyway, the few times I’ve had access to
marijuana in the last few years, my biggest problem was always finding
the time to smoke it. Whatever else it may be, recreational drug use is a
leisure activity, and leisure is something in woefully short supply at
this point in my life. No small part of the pleasure I got from reading
Hogshire’s drug adventures consisted of nostalgia for a time when I
could set aside a couple of hours, even a whole day, to see what it
might feel like to have a reptilian brain.
Nowadays what leisure time I do have tends to be spent in the garden, a
passion that in recent years has turned into a professional interest—I
am, among other things, a garden writer. I mention this to help explain
the keen interest I took in Jim Hogshire’s subsequent project: a
somewhat unconventional treatise on gardening titled Opium for the
Masses, published in 1994 by an outfit in Port Townsend, Washington,
called Loompanics Unlimited. The book’s astonishing premise is that
anyone can obtain opiates cheaply and safely and maybe even legally—or
at least beneath the radar of the authorities, who, if Hogshire was to
be believed, were overlooking something rather significant in their
pursuit of the war on drugs. According to Hogshire’s book, it is
possible to grow opium from legally available seeds (he provided
detailed horticultural instructions) or, to make matters even easier, to
obtain it from poppy seedpods, which happen to be one of the more
popular types of dried flowers sold in florist and crafts shops. Whether
grown or purchased, fresh or dried, these seedpods contain significant
quantities of morphine, codeine, and thebaine, the principal alkaloids
found in opium.
Hogshire’s claim flew in the face of everything I’d ever heard about
opium—that the “right” kind of poppies grow only in faraway places like
the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, that harvesting opium requires
vast cadres of peasant workers armed with special razor blades, and that
the extraction of opiates is a painstaking and complicated process.
Hogshire made it sound like child’s play.
In addition to the horticultural advice, Opium for the Masses offered
simple recipes for making “poppy tea” from either store-bought or
homegrown poppies, and Hogshire reported that a cup of this infusion
(which is apparently a traditional home remedy in many cultures) would
reliably relieve pain and anxiety and “produce a sense of well being and
relaxation.” Bigger doses of the tea would produce euphoria and a
“waking sleep” populated by dreams of a terrific vividness. Hogshire
cautioned that the tea, like all opiates, was addictive if taken too
many days in a row; otherwise, its only notable side effect was
constipation.
As for the legal implications, Hogshire was encouragingly vague: “Opium,
the juice of the poppy, is a controlled substance but it’s unclear how
illegal the plant itself is.” Here is how I figured one might be able to
toe the line safely between the cultivation of opium poppies, routine
enough in the gardening world, and felony possession of opium: if opium
is the extruded sap of the unripe seedpod, then the dried heads used to
make tea by definition did not involve one with opium. Hogshire didn’t
go quite that far, but he did write that “it is unclear whether it is
illegal to brew tea from poppies you’ve purchased legally from the
store.” As will soon become evident, Jim Hogshire is no longer unclear
on either of these points.
Last winter Hogshire’s lively little paperback joined the works of
Penelope Hobhouse (On Gardening), Gertrude Jekyll (Gardener’s
Testament), and Louise Beebe Wilder (Color in My Garden) on my bedside
table. Winter is when the gardener reads and dreams and draws up schemes
for the borders he will plant come spring, and the more I read about
what the ancient Sumerians had called “the flower of joy,” the more
intriguing the prospect of growing poppies in my garden became,
aesthetically as well as pharmacologically. From Hogshire I drifted over
to the more mainstream garden writers, many of whom wrote extravagantly
of opium poppies—of their ephemeral outward beauty (for the blooms last
but a day or two) and their dark inward mystery.
“Poppies have cast a spell over gardeners and artists for many
centuries,” went one typical garden writer’s lead; this was, inevitably,
quickly followed by the phrase “dark connotations of the opium poppy.”
But nowhere in my reading did I find a clear statement that planting
Papaver somniferum would put a gardener on the wrong side of the law.
“When grown in a garden,” one authority on annuals declared, somewhat
ambiguously, “the cultivation of P. somniferum is a case of Honi soit
qui mal y pense. (Shame to him who thinks ill.)” In general the garden
writers tended to ignore or gloss over the legal issue and focus instead
on the beauty of somniferum, which all concurred was exquisite.
Reading about poppies that winter, I wondered if it was possible to
untangle the flower’s physical beauty from the knowledge of its narcotic
properties. It seemed to me that even the lady garden writers who
(presumably) would never think of sampling opium had been subconsciously
influenced by its mood-altering potential; Louise Beebe Wilder tells us
that poppies set her “heart vibrating with their waywardness.” Merely
to gaze at a poppy was to feel dreamy, to judge by the many American
Impressionist paintings of the flower, or from the experience of Dorothy
and company, who you’ll recall were interrupted on their journey
through Oz when they passed out in a field of scarlet poppies. If ever
there was an innocent angle from which to gaze at the opium poppy, our
culture seems long ago to have forgotten where it is.
By now I too was falling under the spell of the opium poppy. I dug out
my college edition of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater, and I reread Coleridge’s descriptions of his opium dreams
(“. . . how divine that repose is, what a spot of enchantment, a green
spot of fountains and flowers and trees in the very heart of a waste of
sands”). I read accounts of the Opium Wars, in which England went to war
for no loftier purpose than to keep China’s harbors open to opium
clipper ships bound from India, whose colonial economy depended on opium
exports. I read about nineteenth-century medicine, in whose arsenal
opium—usually in the form of a tincture called laudanum—was easily the
most important weapon. In part this was because the principal goal of
medical care at that time was not so much to cure illness as to relieve
pain, and there was (and is) no better painkiller than opium and its
derivatives. But opium-based preparations were also used to treat, or
prevent, a great variety of ills, including dysentery, malaria,
tuberculosis, cough, insomnia, anxiety, and even colic in infants.
(Since opium is extremely bitter, nursing mothers would induce babies to
ingest it by smearing the medicine on their nipples.) Regarded as
“God’s own medicine,” preparations of opium were as common in the
Victorian medicine cabinet as aspirin is in ours.
Is there another flower that has had anywhere near the opium poppy’s
impact on history and literature? In the nineteenth century, especially,
the poppy played as crucial a role in the course of events as petroleum
has played in our own century: opium was the basis of national
economies, a staple of medicine, an essential item of trade, a spur to
the Romantic revolution in poetry, even a casus bell).
Yet I had to canvass dozens of friends before I found one who’d actually
tried it; opium in its smokable form is apparently all but impossible
to obtain today, no doubt because smuggling heroin is so much easier and
more lucrative. (One unintended consequence of the war on drugs has
been to increase the potency of all illicit drugs: garden-variety
marijuana has given way to powerful new strains of sinsemilla; and
powdered cocaine, to crack.) The friend who had once smoked opium smiled
wistfully as he recalled the long-ago afternoon: “The dreams! The
dreams!” was all he would say. When I pressed him for a more detailed
account, he referred me to Robert Bulwer-Lytton, the Victorian poet,
who’d likened the effect to having one’s soul rubbed down with silk.
There was no question that I would have to try to grow it, if only as a
historical curiosity. Okay, not only that, but that too. Again, you have
to understand the gardener’s mentality. I once grew Jenny Lind melons, a
popular nineteenth-century variety named for the most famous soprano of
the time, just to see if I could grow them, but also to glean some idea
of what the word “melon” might have conjured in the mind of Walt
Whitman or Chester Arthur. I planted an heirloom apple tree, “Esopus
Spitzenberg,” simply because Thomas Jefferson had planted it at
Monticello, declaring it the “finest eating apple in the world.”
Gardening is, among other things, an exercise of the historical
imagination, and I was by now eager to stare into the black heart of an
opium poppy with my own eyes.
So I began studying the flower sections of the seed catalogues, which by
February formed a foot-high pile on my desk. I found “breadseed
poppies” (whose seeds are used in baking) for sale in Seeds Blum, a
catalogue of heirloom plants from Idaho, and several double varieties
(that is, flowers with multiple petals) described as Papaver
paeoniflorum in the catalogue of Thompson & Morgan, the British seed
merchants. Burpee carries a breadseed poppy called “Peony Flowered,”
whose blooms resemble “ruffled pom-poms.” In Park’s, a large, mid-market
seed catalogue from South Carolina (their covers invariably feature
scrubbed American children arranged in a sea of flowers and vegetables),
I found a white double poppy called “White Cloud” and identified as
“Papaver somniferum paeoniflorum.” Although I didn’t know it at the
time, all these poppies turn out to be strains of Papaver somniferum.
In Cook’s, the catalogue from which I usually order my seeds for salad
greens and exotic vegetables, I found paeoniflorum and rhoeas, as well
intriguing varieties of somniferum: “Single Danish Flag,” a tall poppy
that, judging from the catalogue copy, closely resembles the classic
scarlet poppies I’d read about and seen in Impressionist paintings; and
“Hens and Chicks,” about which the catalogue was particularly
enthusiastic: “the large lavender blooms are a wonderful prelude to the
seed pods, which are striking in a dried arrangement. A large central
pod (the hen) is surrounded by dozens of tiny pods (the chicks).” More
to the point, Hogshire had indicated in Opium for the Masses that “Hens
and Chicks” might prove especially potent.
This was an issue I had wondered about: the ornamental varieties on sale
in the catalogues had obviously been bred for their visual or, in the
case of the breadseed poppies, culinary qualities. It seemed likely
that, as breeders concentrated on these traits to the neglect of others,
the morphine and codeine content of these poppies might have dwindled
to nothing. So what were the best varieties to plant for opiates?
I couldn’t very well pose this question to my usual sources in the
gardening world—to Dora Galitzki, the horticulturist who answers the
help line at the New York Botanical Garden or to Shepherd Ogden, the
knowledgeable and helpful proprietor of Cook’s. So I tried, through a
mutual friend, to get in touch with Jim Hogshire himself. I e-mailed
him, explaining what I was up to and asking for recommendations as to
the best poppy varieties as well as for advice on cultivation. As I
would do with any fellow flower enthusiast, I asked him if he had any
seeds he might be willing to share with me and told him about the
varieties I’d found in the catalogues. “How can I be confident that
these seeds—which have obviously been bred and selected for their
ornamental qualities—will `work’?”
As it turned out, I picked the wrong time to ask. One morning a few days
later, and before I’d had any response to my e-mail, I got a call from
our mutual friend saying that Hogshire had been arrested in Seattle and
was being held in the city jail on felony drug charges. It seems that on
March 6 a Seattle Police Department SWAT team had burst into Hogshire’s
apartment, armed with a search warrant claiming that he was running a
“drug lab.” Hogshire and his wife, Heidi, were held in handcuffs while
the police conducted a six-hour search that yielded a jar of
prescription pills, a few firearms, and several bunches of dried poppies
wrapped in cellophane. The poppies had evidently come from a florist,
but Hogshire was nevertheless charged with “possession of opium poppy,
with intent to manufacture and distribute.” The guns were legal, but one
was cited in the indictment as an “enhancement”: another product of the
drug war is the fact that the penalties on some narcotics charges rise
steeply when the crime “involves” a firearm, even when that firearm is
legal or registered. Neither Jim nor Heidi Hogshire had ever been
arrested before. Now Jim was being held on $10,000 bail; Heidi, on
$2,000. If convicted, Jim faced ten years in prison; Heidi faced a
two-year sentence on a lesser charge.
Forgive me for the sudden upwelling of naked self-interest, but all I
could think about was that e-mail of mine, buried somewhere on the hard
drive of Hogshire’s computer, which no doubt was already in the hands of
the police forensics unit. Or maybe the message had been intercepted
somehow, part of a DEA tap on Hogshire’s phone or a surveillance of his
e-mail account. I could hardly believe my stupidity! Suddenly I thought I
could feel the dull tug of the underworld’s undertow, felt as if I’d
been somehow implicated in something, though exactly what that might be I
couldn’t say. Yet my confidence that I stood firmly on the sunny side
of the law had been shaken. They had my name.
But this was crazy, paranoid thinking, wasn’t it? After all, I hadn’t
done anything, except order some flower seeds and write a mildly
suggestive piece of e-mail. As for Hogshire, surely there had to be more
to this bust than a bunch of dried poppies; it didn’t make any sense. I
asked our mutual friend if he would be in touch with Hogshire anytime
soon, because I was eager to talk to him, to learn more about his
peculiar case.
“Also,” I added, as casually as I could manage, “would you mind asking
him whether he’s gotten any e-mail from me?”
2.
My poppy seeds arrived a couple of weeks later. My plan was to sow them,
see if I could get flowers and pods, and decide only then whether to
proceed any further. I’d been spooked by Hogshire’s arrest, doubly
spooked to learn from our friend that in fact he had never received my
e-mail—undelivered e-mail being highly unusual in my experience. But I
still had little reason to doubt that growing poppies for ornamental
purposes was legal, and so on an unseasonably warm afternoon in the
first week of April I planted my seeds—two packets, each containing a
thimbleful of grayish-blue specks. They looked exactly like what they
were: poppy seeds, the same ones you find on a kaiser roll or a bagel.
(In fact, it is possible to germinate poppy seeds bought from the
supermarket’s spice aisle. Also, eating such seeds prior to taking a
drug test can produce a positive result.)
I’d prepared a tiny section of my garden, an area where the soil is
especially loamy and, somewhat more to the point, several old apple
trees block the view from the road. Papaver somniferum is a hardy annual
that grows best in cool conditions, so it isn’t necessary to wait for
the last frost date to sow; I read that in the South, in fact, gardeners
sow their poppies in late fall and winter them over. Sowing is a simple
matter of broadcasting, or tossing, the seeds over the surface of the
cultivated soil and watering them in; since the seeds are so tiny,
there’s no need to cover them, but it is a good idea to mix the seeds
with a handful of sand in order to spread them as evenly as possible
over the planting area.
Within ten days my soil had sprouted a soft grass of slender green
blades half an inch high. These were soon followed by the poppies’ first
set of true leaves, which are succulent and spiky, not unlike those of a
loose leaf lettuce. The color is a pale, vegetal, green-tinged blue,
and the foliage is slightly dusted-looking; “glaucous” is the
horticultural term for it.
The poppies came up in thick clumps that would clearly need thinning.
The problem was, how much thinning, and when? Hogshire’s book was vague
on this point, suggesting a spacing of anywhere from six inches to two
feet between plants. My “straight” gardening books advised six to eight
inches, but I realized that their recommendations assumed that the
gardener’s chief interest was flowers. I, of course, was less interested
in floriferousness than in, um, big juicy pods. Eventually I called one
of the seed companies that sell poppies and delicately asked about
optimal spacing, “assuming for the sake of argument someone wanted to
maximize the size and quality of his poppy heads.” I don’t think I
aroused any suspicion from the person I talked to, who advised a minimum
of eight inches between plants.
Around the time I first thinned my poppies, late in May, a friend who
knew of my new horticultural passion sent me a newspaper clipping that
briefly stopped me in my tracks. It was a gardening column by C. Z.
Guest in the New York Post that carried the headline JUST SAY NO TO
POPPIES. Guest wrote that although opium poppy seeds are legal to
possess and sell, “the live plants (or even dried, dead ones) fall into
the same legal category as cocaine and heroin.” This seemed very hard to
believe, and the fact that the source was a socialite writing in a
tabloid not known for its veracity made me inclined to disregard it.
But I guess my confidence had been undermined, because I decided it
wouldn’t hurt to make sure Guest was wrong. I put in a call to the local
barracks of the state police. Without giving my name, I told the
officer who answered the phone that I was a gardener here in town and
wanted to double-check that the poppies in my garden were legal.
“Poppies? Not a problem. Poppies have been declared a flower.”
I told him the ones I had planted were labeled somniferum, and that a
neighbor had told me that that meant they were opium poppies.
“What color are they? Are they orange?” This didn’t seem especially
relevant; I’d read that opium poppies could be white, purple, scarlet,
lavender, and black, as well as a reddish-orange. I told him that mine
were both lavender and red.
“Those are not illegal. I’ve got the orange ones in my garden. About two
feet tall, came with the house. What you’ve got to understand is that
all poppies have some opium in them. It’s only a problem if you start to
manufacture opium.”
“Like if I slit open a head?”
“Nah, you can cut one of them open and look inside. It’s only if you do
it with intent to sell or profit.”
“But what if I had a lot of them?”
“Say you planted two acres of poppies—just for scenery looks? It’s not a
problem—until you start manufacturing.”
I was happy to have the state trooper’s okay, but by now a seed of doubt
had been planted in my mind. Whether it was C. Z. Guest or the waylaid
e-mail—that stupid, incriminating query careening unencrypted through
cyberspace—I’d started to get the willies about my poppies. A mild case,
to be sure—except for one harrowing night in May when I was caught in
the grip of a near-nightmare. In my dream I awake to the sound of police
car doors slamming out in front of my house, followed by footsteps on
the porch. I leap out of bed and race out the back door into the garden
to destroy the evidence. I start eating my poppies, which in the dream
are already dried, dry as dust in fact, but I stuff the pods and the
stems and the leaves into my mouth as fast as I possibly can. The
chewing is horrible, Sisyphean, the swallowing almost impossible; I feel
like I am eating my way through a vast desert of plant material, racing
madly to beat the clock.
My first impulse on waking was to rip out my poppies right away. My
second impulse was to laugh: so this was my first opium dream.
3.
When Jim Hogshire entered my life, in April, my poppies were six inches
tall and thriving, their bed a deep, lush carpet of serrated green. I’d
heard that Hogshire had raised bail, and our mutual friend was trying to
put us in touch; I wanted to talk to him about his case, which I was
now thinking of writing about, but I also still hoped to pick up some
horticultural tips. I couldn’t phone Hogshire, because he’d been thrown
out of his apartment. It seems that Washington, like many states, has a
law under which tenants charged with drug crimes may be summarily
evicted; after the bust, someone from the sheriff’s office had paid
Hogshire’s landlady a visit, notifying her of her “rights” in this
regard and urging her to serve the Hogshires with an eviction notice. It
sounded to me like a violation of Hogshire’s right to due process—after
all, he hadn’t been found guilty of anything. This was my first
introduction to what civil-liberties lawyers have taken to calling “the
drugs exception to the Bill of Rights.” Over the past several years, in
cases involving drugs, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the
government’s new crop of laws, penalties, and police tactics, thereby
narrowing the scope of due process as well as long-established
protections against illegal search, double jeopardy, and entrapment.
Hogshire began calling me at odd hours of the day and night. He sounded
like a man who had been brought to the end of his tether, edgy and
distrustful; disquisitions on Papaver nomenclature drifted into
diatribes about the indignities his pet birds had suffered at the hands
of the police. The voice on the phone was a far cry from the urbane and
funny character I’d been reading in Pills-a-go-go. But then, Hogshire’s
bust had left him broke and homeless, bouncing from one friend’s couch
to another, and adrift on uncharted legal waters—for no one had ever
been prosecuted before for possessing dried poppies bought from a
florist. Much of what he told me sounded paranoid and crazy, an
improbable nightmare featuring a “snitch letter” to the police from a
disgruntled houseguest; a search warrant alleging, among other things,
that Hogshire was making narcotics out of Sudafed(!); and a police
officer who waved Hogshire’s writings in his face and asked, “With what
you write, weren’t you expecting this?” Listening to Hogshire’s
fantastic account over the phone made me more than a little skeptical,
and yet everything he told me I subsequently found confirmed in the
court records.
According to documents filed by the prosecutor’s office, it was indeed
an informant’s letter that led to the March 6 raid on the Hogshires’
apartment; the letter, sent to the Seattle police by a man named Bob
Black, was cited along with Hogshire’s published writings as “probable
cause” in the search warrant. Bob Black is the disgruntled houseguest,
the black hat in Hogshire’s bizarre tale. A fellow Loompanics author
(The Abolition of Work and Other Essays), Black is a self-described
anarchist whom the Hogshires met for the first time when he arrived to
spend the night on February 10; Loompanics owner Mike Hoy had asked the
Hogshires if, as a personal favor, they’d be willing to put Black up in
their apartment while he was in Seattle on assignment.
The evening went very badly. Accounts differ on the particulars, as well
as on the chemical catalysts involved, but an argument about religion
(Hogshire is a Muslim) somehow degenerated into a scuffle in which Black
grabbed Heidi Hogshire around the throat and Jim threatened his guest
with a loaded M-1 rifle. Ten days later, Black wrote to the Seattle
police narcotics unit “to inform you of a drug laboratory . . . in the
apartment of Jim Hogshire and Heidi Faust Hogshire.” The letter, a
denunciation worthy of a sansculotte, deserves to be quoted at length.
The Hogshires are addicted to opium, which they consume as a tea and
by smoking. In a few hours on February 10/11 I saw quarts of the tea,
and
his wife smaller amounts. He also took Dexandrine and Ritalin several
times. They have a vacuum pump and other drug-manufacturing tech.
Hogshire told me he was working out a way to manufacture heroin from
Sudafed.
Hogshire is the author of the book Opium for the Masses which explains
how to grow opium and how to produce it from the fresh plant or from
seeds obtainable from artist-supply stores. His own consumption is so
huge that he must be growing it somewhere. I enclose a copy of parts
of his book. He also publishes a magazine Pills a Go Go under an alias
promoting the fraudulent acquisition and recreational consumption of
controlled drugs.
Should you ever pay the Hogshires a visit, you should know that they
keep an M-1 rifle leaning against the wall near the computer.
Largely on the strength of this letter, the police were able to get a
magistrate to sign a search warrant and raid the Hogshires’ apartment.
It was quarter to seven in the evening, and Jim Hogshire was reading a
book in his living room when he heard the knock at the door; the instant
he answered it he found himself thrown up against a wall. Heidi, who
was at the grocery store at the time, arrived home to find her husband
in handcuffs and a SWAT team, outfitted in black ninja suits, ransacking
her apartment. The SWAT team was so large—twenty officers, by Jim’s
estimate—that only a few could fit into the one-bedroom apartment at a
time; the rest lined up in the hall outside.
“Do you publish this?” Jim recalls one officer demanding to know, as he
waved a copy of Pills-a-go-go in his face. And then, “Where’s your poppy
patch?” Jim pointed out that it was wintertime and asked the officer,
“Why should I grow poppies when they’re on sale in the stores?”
“You’re lying.”
This particular SWAT team specialized in raiding drug labs, which may
have been what they expected to find in the Hogshires’ apartment. They
had to settle, however, for dried poppies: a sealed cardboard box
containing ten bunches wrapped in cellophane. The police refused to
believe that Hogshire had bought them from a store. The police also
found the vacuum pump Black had mentioned (though they didn’t bother to
seize it), the jar of pills, two rifles and three pistols (all legal), a
thermite flare that Hogshire had bought at a gun show, a box of test
tubes, and several copies of Opium for the Masses.
The Hogshires spent three harrowing days in jail before learning of the
charges filed against them. Heidi was charged with possession of a
Schedule II controlled substance: the opium poppies. Jim was charged
with “possession of opium poppy, with intent to manufacture or
distribute,” an offense that, with the firearms enhancement, carries a
ten-year sentence.
At a preliminary hearing in April, Jim Hogshire was fortunate enough to
come before a judge who raised a skeptical eyebrow at the charges filed
against him. The hearing had its comic moments. In support of the
government’s assertion that Hogshire had intent to distribute, the
prosecutor, apparently unfamiliar with the literary reference, cited the
title of his book: “It’s not called `Opium for Me,’ `Opium for My
Friends,’ or `Opium for Anyone I Know.’ It’s called `Opium for the
Masses.’ Which indicates that it’s opium for a lot of people.”
The judge, a man who evidently knew a thing or two about gardening,
found the language in the indictment particularly dubious: the state had
accused Hogshire not of manufacturing opium but of manufacturing opium
poppies. “How do you manufacture an opium poppy?” the judge asked, and
then answered his own question: “You propagate them—it’s the only way.”
By “propagate” the judge meant planting and growing, yet, as he pointed
out, the state had presented no evidence that Hogshire had been doing
any such thing. “If you had him with a field of poppies, then I think
you’ve got him propagating them in some way. Particularly with the cut
poppies and extracting the chemical.” But without evidence that Hogshire
had actually grown the poppies, the judge reasoned, there was no basis
for the manufacturing charge.
The prosecutor sought to recover by citing snapshots seized in the raid
that showed Hogshire in an unidentified garden with live poppies whose
heads had been slit; he also claimed that “there are poppies outside of
his apartment.” (There may have been an element of truth to this:
according to Hogshire, his landlady had had opium poppies in her
garden—though in early March, at the time of the raid, it would have
been too early in the season for them to have come up.)
The judge was unpersuaded: “Can you tell me whether those are the
relevant genus and species? My mom has poppies outside of her house.”
The prosecutor could not satisfy the judge on this point, so the judge
granted the defense’s motion to dismiss the sole charge against
Hogshire.
One might think that this would have been the end of Jim Hogshire’s
ordeal. But the state evidently wasn’t through with him, for in June,
after dropping charges against Heidi in exchange for a statement
asserting that everything seized in the raid belonged to her husband,
the prosecutor refiled charges—this time for simple possession of opium
poppies—and also added a new felony count to the amended indictment:
possession of an “explosive device,” citing the thermite flare found
during the raid. An arraignment on the new charges was scheduled for
June 28. When Hogshire failed to appear, a warrant was issued for his
arrest.
4.
I read through the court papers with a mounting sense of personal panic,
for the squabble in the Seattle courtroom did not in any way seem to
challenge the underlying fact that growing or possessing opium poppies
was apparently grounds for prosecution. I called Hogshire’s attorney,
who confirmed as much and directed me to the text of the Federal
Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
The language of the statute was distressingly clear. Not only opium but
“opium poppy and poppy straw” are defined as Schedule II controlled
substances, right alongside PCP and cocaine. The prohibited poppy is
defined as a “plant of the species Papaver somniferum L., except the
seed thereof,” and poppy straw is defined as “all parts, except the
seeds, of the opium poppy, after mowing.” In other words, dried poppies.
Section 841 of the act reads, “[I]t shall be unlawful for any person
knowingly or intentionally . . . to manufacture, distribute, or
dispense, or possess with intent to manufacture, distribute, or
dispense” opium poppies. The definition of “manufacturing” includes
propagating—i.e., growing. Three things struck me as noteworthy about
the language of the statute. The first was that it goes out of its way
to state that opium poppy seeds are, in fact, legal, presumably because
of their legitimate culinary uses. There seems to be a chicken-and-egg
paradox here, however, in which illegal poppy plants produce legal poppy
seeds from which grow illegal poppy plants.
The second thing that struck me about the statute’s language was the
fact that, in order for growing opium poppies to be a crime, it must be
done “knowingly or intentionally.” Opium poppies are commonly sold under
more than one botanical name, only one of which—Papaver somniferum—is
specifically mentioned in the law, so it is entirely possible that a
gardener could be growing opium poppies without knowing it. There would
therefore appear to be an “innocent gardener” defense. Not that it would
do me any good: at least some of the poppies I’d planted had been
clearly labeled Papaver somniferum, a fact that I have—perhaps
foolishly—confessed in these very pages to knowing. The third thing that
struck me was the most stunning of all: the penalty for knowingly
growing Papaver somniferum is a prison term of five to twenty years and a
maximum fine of $1 million.
So C. Z. Guest had been right after all, and Martha Stewart (and the
state trooper) wrong: the cultivation of opium poppies, regardless of
the purpose, is indeed a felony, no different in the eyes of the law
than manufacturing angel dust or crack cocaine. It didn’t matter one bit
whether I slit the heads or otherwise harvested my poppies: I had
already crossed the line I thought I could safely toe—had crossed it, in
fact, back on that April afternoon when I planted my seeds. (What’s
more, I was vulnerable to the very charge that hadn’t stuck to
Hogshire—manufacturing!) I was, potentially at least, in deep, deep
trouble.
Or was I? For had anyone besides Jim Hogshire ever actually been
arrested for the possession or manufacture of poppies? A Nexis search
fumed up no other case; nor did calls to more than a dozen lawyers,
prosecutors, civil libertarians, and journalists who keep tabs on the
drug war. Several were unaware that cultivating poppies was even against
the law; when so informed, nearly all had precisely the same slightly
bemused reaction: “Don’t you think the government has better things to
do?” I certainly hoped that this was the case, but there the menacing
statute was, right there on the books.
I called several experienced gardeners too, hoping to get a clearer
picture of the risk involved in growing poppies. One told me a story
about a DEA agent on vacation in Idaho who’d tipped off the county
sheriff that poppies were being grown in local gardens; another had
heard that the DEA had recently ordered the removal of the poppies
growing at Jefferson’s Monticello. (Both stories sounded apocryphal, but
both turned out to be true.) I phoned a radio call-in gardening show,
asking the resident expert whether I needed to worry about the opium
poppies growing in my garden, “I’m not a lawyer,” she said, “but
wouldn’t it be a shame if gardeners had to pass up such a magnificent
flower?”
No one had heard of an actual bust, and most of the gardeners I spoke to
seemed blithely unconcerned when I apprised them of the theoretical
peril. Some treated me carefully, as though it were paranoid of me to
worry. The answer-lady at the New York Botanical Garden tried to
reassure me (a bit patronizingly, I thought) by saying that, to her
knowledge, there were no “poppy patrols out there.” Wayne Winterrowd,
the expert on annuals who’d written “Shame to him who thinks ill” of the
poppy grower, likened the crime to tearing the tags off pillows and
mattresses, another federal offense no one ever seemed to do time for.
Laughing off my worries, he offered to send me seeds of a “stunning”
jetblack opium poppy he grew in his Vermont garden. He also confirmed
(as did a botanist I spoke to later) that “breadseed poppies” as well as
Papaver paeoniflorum and giganteum were botanically no different than
Papaver somniferum. I’d planted a handful of paeoniflorum, and had had
no idea what they were—until now.
I took no small comfort in Winterrowd’s mattress-tag analogy, if only
because I really did not want to have to rip out my poppies, at least
not now. For my first poppy was on the verge of bloom. It was the first
week of July when I noticed at the end of one slender, downward-nodding
stem a bud the size of a cherry, covered in a soft, hairy down. The
bud’s outer covering, or calyx, had split open, and I could see the
scarlet petals folded inside, packed as tightly as a parachute. By the
following morning the stem had drawn itself up to its full four-foot
height and the petals—five deltas of rich red silk freaked with
black—had completely unfurled, casting off their calyx and fuming to
face the sun. That solitary exquisite bloom was followed the next day by
three more equally formidable dabs of pigment, then six, then a dozen,
until my poppy patch was a terrific, traffic-stopping blur of color, of a
red so red as to be platonic. Now I knew what Robert Browning meant
when he spoke of “the poppy’s red effrontery”: this hue was a shout. The
lavender blooms of another variety followed a few days later, a cooler
but no less pure jolt of color. When the sun stood behind them, toward
evening, the petals were as luminous as stained glass.
“It is a pity,” Louise Beebe Wilder wrote, “that Poppies are in such
haste to shed their silken petals and display their crowned seedpods.”
Having seen them, I would have to disagree with her, and not only on
pharmacological grounds. The poppy’s seedpods are scarcely less
arresting than its flowers: swelling blue-green finials poised atop neat
round pedestals (called stipes), each pod crowned with an upturned
anther like a Catherine wheel. For most of the month of July my whole
poppy patch was alive with interest. All at once and side by side you
had the drooping sleepy buds, the brilliant flags of color, and the
stately upright urns of seeds, all set against the same cool backdrop of
dusty green foliage. I couldn’t decide what was more beautiful: leaf,
bud, flower, or seedpod. I did decide that this poppy patch was as
gorgeous as anything I’d ever planted.
My fellow gardeners were making me feel foolish for even thinking of
cutting down these flowers; indeed, as I admired my poppies in their
full midsummer glory, this unexpectedly lavish gift of nature, it was
difficult to credit the notion that they could possibly be illegal—that
for the purposes of the law I might just as well be admiring packets of
white powder on a table in some dingy uptown drug factory. But this, I
knew, was indeed the case. And what a metamorphosis this was!—that an
act as ordinary and blameless as the planting of a handful of common and
perfectly legal seeds could somehow transport one into the country of
criminality.
Yet this was a metamorphosis that required not only the physical seed
and water and sunlight but, crucially, a certain metaphysical ingredient
too: the knowledge that the poppies I beheld were, in fact, of the
genus Papaver and the species somniferum. For although ignorance of the
law is never a defense, in the case of poppies, ignorance of botany may
be. True, I had planted seeds I knew to be Papaver somniferum and then
blabbed that fact to the world. But what if instead I had planted
“breadseed poppies,” or the poppy seeds on a poppy-seed bagel? What if I
had planted only the Papaver paeoniflorum I’d ordered, the one I’d had
no idea was really somniferum? As I stood there admiring the
extravagantly doubled blooms of this poppy, I realized that growing it
was no more felonious than growing asters or marigolds—for as long, that
is, as I remained ignorant of the fact that this poppy, too, was
somniferum. But it’s too late for me now; I know too much. And so, dear
reader, do you.
It was precisely this knowledge that inspired the slightly cracked logic
behind what I now decided to do. I had not planned to slit even one of
my poppies, for fear that it was the step that would take me across the
line into criminality. But now I knew I had already taken the fateful
step. In for a dime, in for a dollar. I know, this wasn’t even a
remotely rational approach to the situation: a slit seedpod in my garden
would constitute proof that I knew exactly what kind of poppies I had.
Yet that particular summer afternoon, as I stood there alone with my
ravishing poppies, in what, after all, was my garden, this logic seemed
strangely compelling. So I combed my little stand of poppies for the
fattest, most turgid seed head and bent it toward me.
Taking
the warm, plum-size pod between my thumb and forefinger, I nicked its
skin with a thumbnail. After a moment a small bead of milky sap formed
on the surface; the wound continued to bleed for a minute or two, the
sap darkening perceptibly as it oxidized, and then it slowed, clotting. I
dabbed the drop of opium with my forefinger. touched it to my tongue.
It was indescribably bitter. The taste lingered on my palate for the
rest of the afternoon.
When I finally met Jim Hogshire in mid-July, it had been two weeks
since his missed court date. He was staying in Manhattan, a good place
to be anonymous, as he mulled over his next move.
On a hot summer morning we met for coffee on West Twenty-third Street,
afterward, we planned to visit the flower district, to shop for dried
poppies and check out a rumor that Hogshire had heard about a crackdown
on imports of dried poppies. Hogshire was dressed all in white, a
slender thirty-eight-year-old with long blond hair gathered in a neat
ponytail. His face was handsome but careworn; his fine, angular features
were lined, and his deep-set eyes, which are a striking shade of gray,
were ringed with shadows. In conversation I found him alternately
expansive and wary, though only rarely did he ask to speak off the
record. For someone who had no place to live, who was one traffic stop
away from going to jail, Hogshire seemed surprisingly composed—or at
least a lot more composed than I would be under the circumstances.
Hogshire is passionate about poppies, and we covered that mutual
interest for a while, shuttling from Papaver horticulture to
jurisprudence, Papaver nomenclature to chemistry. I learned about the
thirty-eight different alkaloids that have been found in somniferum, the
“biogenetic pathways” from thebaine to morphine (he lost me here), and
the “incredible potential” of the “Bentley compounds” that have been
synthesized from Papaver bracteatum. He told me that he’d first heard
about poppy tea from a friend, a gardener whose Russian grandmother had
brewed it as a home remedy. Hogshire started experimenting with poppies
that he found growing “literally right outside the door of my
apartment.”
“The first few times I got it all wrong—I didn’t grind the poppies up,
and I was indiscriminate, using the leaves and stems as well as the
pods. I also tried smoking all the various parts, using myself and my
wife as guinea pigs. I proved to myself empirically that the heads are
undoubtedly the most potent part of the plant.” I realized that Hogshire
regarded himself as heir to a great tradition of self-experimentation
in Western medicine. Eventually he learned how to make a potent tea from
dried poppies, pulverizing a handful of heads in a coffee grinder and
then steeping the powder in hot water.
I asked him to describe the effects of a cup of poppy tea.
“It’s not a knock-you-on-your-ass sort of thing, not like smoking opium.
In fact, a lot of people will tell you they forget that they are high.
It starts with a tickling feeling in the stomach that then rises up into
the shoulders and head—this feeling of just . . . joy. You feel
optimistic about things, energetic but at the same time relaxed. You’ll
remain functional: you won’t say anything stupid and you’ll remember
everything that happens. You won’t nod out, though you will feel a
strong desire to close your eyes. Any pain you have will go away; the
tea will also relieve exogenously caused depression. That’s why poppy
tea is served at funerals in the Middle East. It can make sadness go
away.” THIS POSTER WILL REMIND YOU that the next day you will be HUGELY DEPRESSED.
It’s hard to believe that commercially available flowers could
produce such effects, and at times the claims in Hogshire’s book had
reminded me of earlier “household highs”—smoking banana peels, for
instance (“they call me mellow yellow,” Donovan had purred back in
1967), eating morning-glory seeds (purported to be a hallucinogen), or
sipping cocktails made from Coca-Cola and aspirin. Could it be there was
some sort of placebo effect at work here? Hogshire showed me a
scientific article, from the Bulletin on Narcotics, that stated plainly
that commercially sold dried poppies did indeed contain opiates, in
significant quantities. He also pointed out that it was possible to
become addicted to poppy tea. In his book he says, “Opium withdrawal
hurts, but the pain will end, usually within three to five days…. Those
are indeed hard days for the kicking addict but it is no worse than a
nasty case of the flu.”
This certainly didn’t sound like the effects of a placebo.
If Hogshire was right, then opium was hidden in plain sight in
America—which certainly would explain why the government would take an
interest in the author of Opium for the Masses. He and his
small-press book had punctured a set of myths that have served the
government well since 1942, when Congress decided that the best way to
control opiates was to ban domestic cultivation of Papaver somniferum
and force pharmaceutical companies to import opium (which they use to
produce morphine and other opiates) from a handful of designated Asian
countries. Since then the perception has taken hold that this
legislative stricture is actually a botanical one—that opium will grow
only in these places.
The other myth Hogshire had exploded is that the only way to extract
opiates from opium poppies is by slitting their heads in the field, a
complex and time-consuming process that, I heard over and over again
from law-enforcement officials and gardeners alike, made the domestic
production of opium impractical.
The durability of these myths has obliterated knowledge about opium that
was common as recently as a century ago, when opium was still a popular
nonprescription remedy and opium poppies an important domestic crop. As
late as 1915, pamphlets issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture
were still mentioning opium poppies as a good cash crop for northern
farmers. A few decades before, the Shakers were growing opium
commercially in upstate New York. Well into this century, Russian,
Greek, and Arab immigrants in America have used poppy-head tea as a mild
sedative and a remedy for headaches, muscle pain, cough, and diarrhea.
During the Civil War, gardeners in the South were encouraged to plant
opium for the war effort, in order to ensure a supply of painkillers for
the Confederate Army. The descendants of these poppies are thriving to
this day in southern gardens, but not the knowledge of their provenance
or powers.
What Hogshire has done is to excavate this vernacular knowledge and then
publish it to the world—in how-to form, with recipes. As far as I can
tell, the knowledge in his book hasn’t seeped too far into the drug
culture—Opium for the Masses has sold between eight and ten thousand
copies, and I turned up no evidence of widespread tea-brewing in drug
circles—yet I was curious to know just how far knowledge about his
knowledge had spread in law-enforcement circles. As Hogshire and I
strolled the few blocks up Sixth Avenue to the flower district, he told
me that, since the book’s publication in 1994, the price of dried
poppies had doubled and the DEA had launched a “quiet” investigation
into the domestic poppy trade. Agents had paid visits to dried-flower
vendors, as well as to the American Association for the Dried and
Preserved Floral Industry, a trade group based in Westport, Connecticut.
All this sounded to me like either boastfulness or paranoia—until, that
is, we got to the flower district.
Manhattan’s flower district is modest, a picturesque couple of blocks of
lower Sixth Avenue where a few dozen dried- and cut-flower wholesalers
have their showrooms at street level. As a pedestrian reaches
Twenty-seventh Street, what had been a particularly dreary stretch of
Manhattan suddenly erupts into greenery and bloom. Buckets of dried
lotus heads and hydrangeas line the storefronts, gardenias in hanging
baskets perfume the air, and clusters of potted ficus trees briefly
transform the grubby sidewalk into a fair copy of a garden path. On
Twenty-eighth Street we stopped in a narrow, cluttered shop that
specializes in dried flowers. Hogshire surveyed a long wall of cubbies
stuffed with unlabeled bunches of dried flowers—yarrow, lotus,
hydrangeas, peonies, and roses in a dozen different hues—until he
spotted the poppies: four different grades, their seedpods ranging in
size from marbles to tennis balls, most of them in bunches of ten
wrapped in cellophane. The smallest ones still wore a green tint and had
a few crunchy leaves wrapped around their stems. The larger poppy heads
were buff-colored and strikingly sculptural. They reminded me of a
botanical photograph by Karl Blossfeldt, the early-twentieth-century
German photographer whose portraits of stems and buds and flowers make
them look as if they’d been cast in iron.
Hogshire asked the woman at the register if she’d had any problems
lately obtaining poppies. She shrugged.
“No problems. How many you need?” I took a bunch, for $10. I felt
weirdly self-conscious about my purchase, and the plastic sack she
offered me was too short for the long stems, so before we stepped back
out onto the street I turned the bunch head-down in the bag.
We heard a very different story across the street, at Bill’s Flowers.
Bill told us that he couldn’t get poppies anymore: according to his
supplier, the DEA—or the USDA, he wasn’t sure—had banned imports a few
months before, “because kids were smoking the seeds or something.” The
supplier had told him that it was okay to sell whatever inventory he had
left but that there’d be no more poppies after that.
Bill’s story was my first indication that the federal authorities were,
as Hogshire had claimed, doing something about the poppy trade—though it
would take me several more weeks to figure out exactly what that
something was.
Before the morning was over, Hogshire invited me up to his room; the day
was getting hot, and he wanted to change his shirt. Most nights since
his eviction he’d spent in the apartments of friends, far from home.
Tomorrow he expected to be staying somewhere else. I’d asked him earlier
why he hadn’t stayed to face the charges in Seattle.
“I would go back in a second if I thought they were going to fight
fair—if I could be sure they wouldn’t manufacture evidence or slap me
back in jail at my arraignment. But the fact that they wouldn’t just
drop this thing after the first charge was thrown out shows me they’re
being vindictive.” (By February, Hogshire had had a change of heart. He
said that he’d retained a new lawyer and that he was planning to go back
to Seattle to face the charges against him.)
I sat on the bed while Hogshire changed his shirt. Looking around the
cramped room, I could see he was traveling light, with little more than a
change of clothes, his laptop computer, some books, a stack of articles
about poppies, and a sheaf of legal papers about his case. I wondered
what it would be like to slip underground—not to be able to go home, not
to have your stuff around, not even to know exactly where you would be
spending the next night, week, month.
6.
Easy as it may have been to distance myself from Hogshire’s underground
existence, riding home on the commuter train I found myself wondering
just how much circumstantial distance really stood between Jim Hogshire
and me. It was less than meets the eye, and far too little for comfort. I
had poppies growing in my garden, after all, and I was preparing an
article that would not only acknowledge that fact but would also reprise
the very information that had gotten Hogshire into so much hot water.
With what you publish, the officer had asked Hogshire as they hauled him
off to jail, weren’t you expecting this? So what, exactly, set us
apart? For one thing, my life wasn’t lived as close to society’s margins
as Jim’s appeared to be; for another, I was writing for a national
magazine rather than the fringe press. And this: I didn’t associate with
people like Bob Black.
I clung to these distinctions in the weeks that followed as I made a
concerted effort to learn just how strongly the DEA really felt about
poppies—whether, as Hogshire had suggested, the government had launched
an investigation and crackdown on domestic opium growing. My curiosity
on this point was journalistic but also somewhat more self-interested,
and urgent, than that. For by discovering what the DEA was up to, I
hoped to learn whether the paranoid fantasies gnawing at me had any
basis in reality. I needed to know whether I should be getting rid of my
poppies as quickly as possible or whether I could safely let them ripen
and then perhaps experiment with poppy tea.
I started checking out Hogshire’s leads. At the American Association for
the Dried and Preserved Floral Industry, Beth Sherman confirmed that a
DEA agent by the name of Larry Snyder had indeed paid the group a visit
in 1995. “He asked us to put an article in our newsletter advising
people not to carry this certain kind of poppy,” she told me. The poppy
had always been illegal, the agent had explained to them, but “prior to
this they didn’t enforce it. They were trying to correct something that
had gotten out of hand, but they were trying to do it in a low-key way.”
The association agreed to publish an article supplied by the DEA
informing their membership that it was illegal to possess or sell
Papaver somniferum.
Hogshire had told me that a Seattle-area flower shop called Nature’s
Arts, Inc., had also been contacted by the DEA. I got in touch with Don
Jackson, the shop’s owner. Jackson, who has been in the dried-flower
business for forty-five years, told me that a local DEA agent named Joel
Wong had visited his shop in March of 1993. The agent had told Jackson
that he was investigating poppies and wanted to know what kind his store
carried and where they came from.
“He took away several poppies and had them tested. A few weeks later he
told me that they were of the opium type and that someone could get high
on it, but he didn’t say I had to stop selling them.” Since then,
Jackson had heard rumors of a crackdown and said that he knew of several
big domestic growers who had stopped planting poppies for fear of
having their crops confiscated. Jackson was concerned about the
disappearance of somniferum from the trade: “We don’t have anything to
replace it with,” he explained. “That seedpod is so nice and big and
round. It’s just what people are looking for as a focal point in an
arrangement.”
When I tried to get in touch with Joel Wong I learned that he’d recently
retired. Another agent in his office took my call but insisted, at the
end of a fifteen-minute chat, that I not quote him by name. Under the
circumstances, I think I’ll oblige. Agent Anonymous seemed to be unaware
of his predecessor’s investigation into dried poppies, so I changed the
subject to poppy growing.
“It’s illegal to grow opium poppies,” the agent said, “but frankly I
don’t see it becoming a big problem, only because it’s so
labor-intensive to harvest the opium. You’ve got to go out early in the
morning and slit the pods, then wait until the gum oozes out, and then
you have to scrape it off pod by pod. Why would you do all this when you
can go down to First and Pike and score some black tar?” (Black tar is a
cheap form of heroin from Mexico.) “I say, let ‘em at it—it’s not going
to be a big problem.”
It was a friendly enough chat, so I figured I’d ask the agent what
advice he’d give a gardener of my acquaintance who had opium poppies
growing in his garden. “I’d tell him it’s illegal and he’s running a
risk of getting his front door kicked. But I’ve got priorities. If he’s a
University of Washington botanist who’s growing poppies, he’s not going
to have his door kicked; on the other hand, if this professor’s scoring
the pods, his door most likely will be kicked. It’s on a case-by-case
basis.
“But I would also tell him, Why grow this illegal plant when there are
so many other beautiful plants you can grow? That would be my advice:
Why grow the opium when you can put your energy into bonsai plants or
orchids, which are so much more challenging? Because how many people can
grow an orchid?”
I had told him that I was a garden writer, and he seemed eager to talk
about orchid growing, his hobby; he mentioned he kept an orchid on his
desk. But when I pressed him about my hypothetical opium-poppy grower,
he turned distinctly less amiable.
“What if this poppy grower is also publishing articles about how to make
poppy tea?”
“Then his door is going to be kicked. Because he’s trying to promote
something that’s illegal.”
It was a chilling conversation. I was reminded of something Hogshire had
said about the laws governing opium poppies. “It’s as if they had on
the books a twenty-miles-per-hour speed limit that was never posted,
never enforced, never even talked about. There’s no way for you to know
that this is the law. Then they pick someone out and say, Hey, you were
going fifty. Don’t you know the speed limit is twenty? You broke the
law—you’re going to jail! But nobody else is being stopped, you say.
That doesn’t matter—this is the law and we have the discretion. The fact
that your car is covered with political bumper stickers that we don’t
like has nothing to do with it. This isn’t about free speech!” Whatever
else they may be, the drug laws are a powerful weapon in the hands of an
Agent Anonymous or, for that matter, a Bob Black. With the speed limit
set so low, all it takes is an angry government agent or a “citizen
informant” to get you pulled over—to get your door kicked.
It was soon after my conversation with Agent Anonymous that I had my
second opium dream. July was nearly over, and I’d come down with a case
of Lyme disease, so my nights were already frightful enough, a roller
coaster of fevers and bone-rattling chills. In the dream I awake to find
faces pressed against the windows of my bedroom, five panes filled with
five round white heads: slightly elfin, slightly Slavic-looking. It’s a
raid, I realize; they’re looking for poppies. All night long they
search my house, and then, at daybreak, they begin to scour my vegetable
garden. They’re examining every inch of soil, they’re even dusting the
leaves of my cabbages for fingerprints. My tormentors are peculiarly
non-menacing, and in this dream I’ve already pulled out my poppies, so I
should have nothing to worry about. Even so, I’m trying as hard as I
can to watch all five of them at once, just to make sure they don’t
“plant” anything, but no matter which way I move, one of them is always
blocking my view of the others. I move this way, then that, and the
frustration of not being able to see what they’re up to builds until I
think I’m going to explode. And then all of a sudden I spot a single,
gorgeous lavender poppy in full bloom on the other side of the garden
fence: an escapee. Will they notice it? I wake before I find out, the
bedclothes drenched with perspiration.
Maybe the Lyme disease explains the nightmare—I’d had intense, fevered
dreams all that week—but it could also have been the call I received
from Jim Hogshire earlier that day, announcing that he was thinking of
coming up to my place “to help out with the harvest.” By comparison, the
dream was a walk in the park, for here was a genuine nightmare: I was
sick with a 103-degree fever, my joints so stiff I could scarcely turn
my head, and a man who was wanted by the police and had no place to live
was proposing to come over to help me harvest a crop that could land me
in jail. My mind careened as I considered precisely how terrible an
idea this was. Did I really want someone who might well, at some point,
come under intense pressure from the police (all right, Hogshire, who
else can you finger?) to see my garden? And once he had unpacked, how
was I ever going to get my houseguest to leave? (The Cable Guy was in
the movie theaters that week.) This is, I know, terribly unfair to dim
Hogshire, who strikes me as a decent-enough fellow, but I kept thinking
about something disturbing that he’d told me: that, after his eviction,
he had given some serious thought to turning in his landlady for growing
opium poppies. I was also flashing on the figure of Bob Black, the
Houseguest from Hell. I rifled my brain for a polite and halfway
credible excuse, but this was a summit that social etiquette had not yet
scaled. In the end I merely spluttered something pathetic about being
too sick to think about having people over right now and needing to
check with my wife before extending any invitations.
I also told Hogshire that I wasn’t sure whether I was ever going to
harvest, which was true. I didn’t yet have a good enough fix on the
DEA’s intentions regarding poppies and, therefore, on the risk
harvesting might entail. It appeared that the DEA was up to something,
but what, exactly? I knew I should contact the DEA’s Washington, D.C.,
headquarters, but knowing how opaque its agents can be (and being more
than a little nervous about alerting them to my existence and interests
while my plants were still in the ground), I decided it might be best
first to find out as much as I could about the scope of their domestic
poppy campaign.
I called Shepherd Ogden at Cook’s, one of the seed companies that sells
opium poppies. He’d heard rumors that the DEA had sent letters to seed
companies requesting they stop selling somniferum, though he hadn’t
received one himself. Ogden reiterated what I already knew: that the
sale of seeds is perfectly legal. Beyond that he was uncertain. He
suggested that I check with the Association of Specialty Cut Flower
Growers, a trade group in Oberlin, Ohio. As it turned out, the president
of the association, a northern California flower grower named Will
Fulton, had just drafted a column for the latest issue of the
association’s newsletter alerting members to the DEA letter, which had
been received by “one of our most reputable seed companies.” The column
quoted the letter’s first paragraph:
It has come to the attention of the United States Department of Justice,
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), that in certain parts of the
United States the opium poppy (Papaver Somniferum L.) is being
cultivated for culinary and horticultural purposes [the italics are
Fulton's].
The cultivation of opium poppy in the United States is illegal, as is
the
possession of “poppy straw, (all parts of the harvested opium poppy
except
the seeds). Certain seed companies have been identified as selling opium
poppy seeds, some with instruction for cultivation printed on the retail
packages. Before this situation adds to the drug abuse epidemic, DEA
is requesting your assistance in curbing such activity.
Judging by the spirited polemic that followed, Will Fulton is the Tom
Paine of the cut-flower world. “Wait a minute!” he wrote. “Where’s the
mens rea [criminal intent] here?” Imagine yourself in the interrogation
room, he asked his members: “`So, you admit that you intended to
cultivate for culinary or horticultural purposes.’
“Why is it illegal to plant a seed, a gift from nature, when your only
intention is to grow it for its physical beauty, yet at the same time it
is perfectly legal to purchase an AK-47 when your only intention is
gopher control?” True, the Founding Fathers had provided for a specific
right to bear arms, but the only reason they’d had nothing to say “about
the right to plant seeds [was] . . . because it never would have
occurred to them that any state might care to abridge that right. After
all, they were writing on hemp paper.
When I reached Fulton at his flower farm in northern California, he
identified the recipient of the DEA letter as Thompson & Morgan, a
venerable British-owned company with offices in New Jersey. Lisa
Crowning, the chief horticulturist at Thompson & Morgan, confirmed
having received the letter, which she regarded as “intimidating” and
“worrisome.” Sent by registered mail in late June, the letter was signed
by “Larry Snyder, Chief, International Drug Unit”—the same man who’d
paid a visit to the American Association for the Dried and Preserved
Floral Industry. Thompson & Morgan hadn’t yet made a final decision
on the DEA’s request, but Crowning hoped the firm would continue to
offer opium poppies, which she told me she grows in her own garden.
Crowning had telephoned Larry Snyder, hoping that there might be “some
halfway measure” that would satisfy the DEA (she mentioned putting a
warning in the catalogue, or removing growing instructions from the
packets) but found him completely inflexible. “We don’t want to offend
the DEA,” she told me, “but we feel we are completely within our rights
to sell these seeds.”
The full text of Snyder’s letter to Thompson & Morgan brought the
alarming news that the DEA was indeed arresting poppy growers. It
alluded to “a recent DEA drug seizure involving a significant quantity
of poppy plants . . . many with scored seed pods . . . [that] revealed a
supply of poppy seeds noting the date of the shipment and the name and
address of your company as the supplier. You should be aware that
supplying these seeds for cultivation purposes may be considered
illegal.” After that thinly veiled threat, Snyder called for a
“voluntary cessation of the sale of Papaver Somniferum L.”
By October the horticultural grapevine was abuzz with poppy talk and
what sounded to me like rumors of war. From Beth Benjamin at Shepherd’s
Garden Seeds I learned that the police had seized poppies from a public
garden project for the homeless that the firm had backed in Santa Cruz.
From Will Fulton I learned about a grower in northern California who had
had his crop plowed under by the DEA. From the American Seed Trade
Association (ASTA) I learned that the DEA—in the person of Larry
Snyder—had formally requested that the group call for a voluntary ban on
sales of poppy seeds; the association had complied, a staffer told me,
“as a civic-duty type of thing.” From Katie Sluder, an importer of dried
flowers based in North Carolina, I learned that a container load of
poppies that she had ordered from a grower in Holland had been turned
back by U.S. Customs.
A crackdown was under way, but it was an oddly muffled crackdown. Rather
than stage a few well-publicized raids, the DEA seemed to be pursuing a
far more subtle strategy. It was working within the industry (in some
cases by intimidating companies engaged in legitimate trade) to stanch
supplies of both seeds and dried flowers without making any noise in
public, much less publicizing exactly what people might be doing with
poppies. The subtle hand behind these efforts apparently belonged to
Larry Snyder, and I decided the time had come for me to talk to him.
When I spotted his phone number printed in ASTA’s newsletter, I felt as
though I had stumbled upon the Wizard of Oz’s direct line.
After I introduced myself as a garden writer, Snyder agreed to an
interview. I began by asking his advice on the poppies growing in my
garden. He came right to the point: “My advice is not to grow them. It
is a violation of federal law. I would get rid of them.” He added that
“we’re not going into Grandma’s garden and taking samples of her
poppies” and confirmed that a gardener had to be growing P. somniferum
with knowledge and intent before the deed became a crime.
Perhaps trying to be helpful, Snyder pointed out that there are 1,200
other species of poppies I could be growing instead, including “rhoeas
and giganteum and a jillion others.” Giganccum? Wasn’t that the one
Wayne Winterrowd had said was just a strain of somniferum? 1 asked him
to describe it. “It’s got an even bigger capsule than somniferum. I’ve
got one of them sitting right here on my desk.”
Snyder acknowledged that the DEA had done nothing to enforce the laws
against poppy growing until recently, after receiving “some information
coming in out of the Northwest and California that people were making a
tea from dried and fresh poppies.”
Was he familiar with a book called Opium for the Masses?
After what felt to me like an uncomfortably long pause, he said simply,
“We see most of the publications.”
I might be mistaken, but it was my impression that Snyder grew suddenly
curt with me at this point in our conversation. He refused to say
anything more about the seizure mentioned in his letter to the seed
companies, on the ground that it was “still an active case.” When I
wondered on what authority the DEA could stop seed companies from
selling legal seeds, he cut me off: “If they sell for cultivation
purposes, that is illegal.” It was hard to see what other reason a seed
company would have for selling seeds.
Then I asked Larry Snyder if he worried that his efforts might alert
people to just how easy it is to obtain opiates in this country.
“There’s always a risk that as more people become aware, some people
will try it. It’s kind of like announcing that the bank leaves the vault
open at nine o’clock in the morning. Is that going to induce someone to
rob the bank? Draw your own conclusions.”
7.
The conclusion I drew was that the DEA was indeed trying to implement a
quiet crackdown, attempting to shut down supplies of poppies, fresh as
well as dried, without calling attention to the fact that, as I had
discovered with Jim Hogshire’s help, they are commonly available and
easily converted into a narcotic. What was in the bank vault that Snyder
alluded to was this very knowledge, still shut up behind a high wall of
misinformation and myth. The DEA appears to be intent on keeping it
there, making sure that domestic opium disappears before the knowledge
gets out that it is, in fact, hidden in plain sight.
The government would seem to be walking a torturously narrow path here,
attempting to send one message to those who are in the know and a very
different one to those who are not. This delicate balancing act was on
full display in the seizure that Larry Snyder wouldn’t discuss with me.
I’m fairly sure that I now know what bust Snyder was talking about—or
not talking about. On June 11, a few weeks before my own poppies had
bloomed, the DEA and local law-enforcement agents in Spalding County,
Georgia, raided the garden of Rodney Allen Moore, a thirty-one-year-old
unemployed man, and his wife, Cherie. Agents seized 258 poppy plants,
many of them with their seed capsules scored; two dozen marijuana
seedlings; and several ounces of bagged marijuana. A search of the
trailer in which the Moores lived turned up records indicating that the
poppy seeds had been ordered from Thompson & Morgan and two other
firms, as well as a copy of Opium for the Masses. Moore was charged with
manufacturing morphine and possession of marijuana. Although he had no
prior arrest record, he was (and as of February is still being) held on
$100,000 bail.
It does not appear that Moore’s bust was part of any organized crackdown
on people who grow poppies; acting on an anonymous tip, agents had come
looking for a plantation of marijuana and apparently stumbled upon the
poppies. But the way the raid was handled is, I think, indicative of the
government’s two-pronged strategy with respect to domestic opium. While
with one hand the DEA took advantage of the bust to track down and
apply pressure to the companies that had (legally) sold Rodney Allen
Moore his poppy seeds, with the other it sought to spread a thick cloud
of disinformation about poppies before the public.
AGENTS TO CHECK ON HOW POPPIES ENTERED THE COUNTRY, read the page-one
headline in the Griffin Daily News, alongside a photo of one of Moore’s
scored poppy heads. The article made no mention of the well-known seed
catalogues found in Moore’s trailer, which, of course, proved that his
poppies had not “entered” the country at all. Instead it quoted Vincent
Morgano, a DEA agent, claiming that the growing of opium poppies in this
country was unheard of: “In my 25 years with the agency I have never
seen it grown in the United States.” HUH? then he didn't look. This poster knew someone in UTAH who grew it by the acre.
Clarence Cox, head of the Griffin-Spalding Narcotics Task Force, assured
the press that the confiscated poppies are not the same kind that are
commonly grown in American flower gardens, Spalding County Sheriff
Richard Cantrell said that each of the 258 seedpods seized in the raid
could, if properly harvested and processed, yield up to a kilo of heroin
apiece. (Talk about alchemy!) Bill Maloney, also with the DEA,
explained to a reporter that extracting narcotics from the pods entailed
a very complicated and dangerous procedure: “I don’t even think someone
with a Ph.D. could do it.” He also said that opium poppies were
extremely rare in the southeastern United States. “The climate has to be
just right,” he explained. “The temperatures have to be warm and you
have to have the right amount of water.”
All these assertions I read in the Griffin Daily News, which had taken
them on faith. And why not? What reason would government officials have
to lie about horticulture? Yet several of these statements I had already
disproved in my own garden. I knew for a matter of fact that the
poppies in question—Papaver somniferum—are indeed the same kind commonly
grown in American gardens, and that growing them anywhere in the
country is not by any stretch a horticultural challenge. And although I
did not yet have direct knowledge that these poppies could be made into a
narcotic tea, James Duke, a botanist I contacted at the United States
Department of Agriculture, had told me that ordinary, garden-variety
opium poppies did contain morphine and codeine, and that these alkaloids
could easily and effectively be extracted from fresh or dried seedpods
by infusing them in hot water—by making a tea. Duke, who has done
extensive work on poppies and is something of a legend in botanical
circles, further suggested that alcohol would make a better solvent for
extracting alkaloids from poppies than water, which made sense: laudanum
is a name for just such a tincture of opium. “You can get the
equivalent of a shot of heroin from a good green pod dissolved in a
glass of vodka,” Duke told me. “So you can see why they might be
concerned.”
And why they might be inclined to lie. If opium is so easy to grow, and
opium tea so easy to make, the best—perhaps the only—way for the
government to stop people from growing and making their own is to
convince them that it can’t be done.
I had every reason to believe that James Duke and Jim Hogshire
were right, and to doubt the statements of the government agents in
Georgia. But it still seemed to me that, in light of the ever-thickening
mist of mis- and disinformation swirling around the subject of poppies,
the best way to nail down the last piece of poppy knowledge would be to
perform a simple experiment on the flowers in my garden. I understood
by now that the laws governing poppy cultivation had already expelled me
from the country of the law-abiding, indeed had done so even before I
knew it had happened. Since those laws drew no distinction between
growing poppies and making poppy tea, there seemed to be no good reason
not to take the steps needed to satisfy my curiosity.
Drinking tea was unlikely to put me in any greater jeopardy than I
already was.
But what about writing about the experience? It was with that
troubling question in mind that I went in search of some legal advice.
Many pages ago I mentioned that civil liberties lawyers now speak in
terms of a “drugs exception” to the Bill of Rights, and in the last few
weeks I have had a chilling education into exactly what that means,
under the tutelage of several criminal lawyers and one former district
attorney. Throughout this whole expert meet, my worst-case scenario,
inspired largely by Jim Hogshire’s experience, has been the midnight
visit from the police; the seed of my paranoia, the germ of my opium
dreams, had always been the team of agents armed with a search warrant,
tearing up my house and garden while my family and I look on helplessly.
I had always assumed, though, that the government would need some
physical evidence (surely the poppies themselves) or at least an
eyewitness—some sort of independent corroboration of the fact that I
grew poppies—before it could bring charges against me.
But after two decades of war against drugs, the power of the government
to move against its citizens has grown even greater than many of us
realize. According to the lawyers I’ve talked to, a search warrant may
turn out to be the least of my worries. It is at least conceivable that a
federal prosecutor could charge me with manufacturing a Schedule II
controlled substance with no more evidence than the contents of this
article. And then there is this even more disturbing fact: under federal
asset-forfeiture laws amended by Congress in 1984 and upheld by the
U.S. Supreme Court, the government could seize my house and land and
evict my family from our home without convicting me of any crime, indeed
without so much as charging me with one. My house and garden can be
“convicted” of the crime of manufacturing opium poppies regardless of
whether I am ever charged, let alone convicted, of that offense. That’s
because under the civil-forfeiture statute the standard of proof is much
lower than in a criminal prosecution; the government need only
demonstrate “probable cause” that my property was involved in a
violation of the drug laws in order to confiscate it. What would it take
to establish that probable cause? In the opinion of some of the lawyers
who have read it, nothing more than the article you hold in your hand.
To borrow an expression from Jim Hogshire, I have exceeded the
twenty-mile-an hour speed limit that the government has posted (or not
posted) over the growing of poppies; that much this article has
established. By publishing it, I enter a zone where the government
possesses the means by which to make a mess of my life. Will its agents
avail themselves of those means, will they pull me over? Obviously
there’s no way of knowing; a huge uncertainty has entered my life. But
the decision now is theirs. And it is a decision that will be shaped by
certain facts of a political and even rhetorical nature that I would be
foolish to ignore.
I happen to believe that it would be no big deal to harvest a couple of
seedpods from my garden, to crush and steep them in a cup of hot water,
and to taste the resultant tea. (It certainly wouldn’t take a Ph.D.) I
happen also to think that it wouldn’t be wrong to describe that tea as
little more than an interesting home remedy—a powerful analgesic that
also produces a mild sensation of euphoria. But that’s my description.
And now that I have made myself vulnerable to the government’s police
power, I am forced to weigh, if not honor, the government’s very
different description of those same acts: that making poppy tea is
“manufacturing narcotics”; that printing its recipe and describing its
effects in any but the most horrific terms would be “promoting drug
abuse.” The decision whether or not to prosecute a per son turns not
only on what crimes he may or may not have committed but also on what
sort of story a prosecutor can tell about him. If I were to describe
here the brewing and tasting of poppy tea, it would be that much easier
for a prosecutor to tell a story in which I appear less like the
countless thousands of poppy-growing gardeners to whom the police turn a
blind eye each season and more like, well, Jim Hogshire.
Hogshire still calls and e-mails me now and then, from wherever.
(“Before I say anything else,” one recent communique began, “I wanna
make sure I remembered your e-mail [address] right so write me back and
tell me something you know . . .”) In our last conversation he urged me
to be “extremely careful what you write, man.” Hogshire’s experience
certainly suggests that it is not my experiments with poppies that are
apt to get me in trouble; it is the act of publishing an account of
those experiments—the one act that, ironically enough, is
constitutionally protected. Would Jim Hogshire have been prosecuted for
the possession of store-bought dried poppies had he never published an
upbeat how-to called Opium for the Masses? It seems doubtful.
We’ll kick his door, Agent Anonymous had memorably vowed when I
described to him a hypothetical author of articles about making poppy
tea. Why? Because that’s promoting something illegal. As the cases of
Jim Hogshire and Rodney Allen Moore suggest, the government appears
every bit as concerned with the supply of poppy information as it is
with the supply of poppies themselves. With what you write, the
arresting officer had asked Jim Hogshire as they drove him off to jail,
weren’t you expecting this? This is not a question I ever want to hear.
8.
It was on a chilly afternoon last fall that I set to work pulling up my
withered poppies. By now they had dried on their stalks, forming
crinkled brown pods the size of walnuts. Examining the seedpods, I could
see that the tiny portals circling the anther at the top of each
capsule had opened, releasing the poppy seeds to the wind. The seed
portals looked like the little observation windows circling the crown of
the Statue of Liberty. By now the seeds had probably been dispersed all
over the neighborhood and would probably come up on their own,
willy-nilly, next spring. (What, I wondered, would be the legal status
of poppies that had planted themselves?) I made a mental note to weed
very carefully next season.
I was unsure exactly what to do with this crop of dead flowers—this
evidence. I’d read that police no longer needed a warrant to search my
garbage (another juridical fruit of the drug war), so throwing the
poppies out with the trash was not an option. The seedpods I decided
simply to crush in my fists; it was blowing fitfully that day, and the
brown shards, light as chaff, were carried off on the wind. That left
only the anonymous-looking stalks, which I decided to compost—somewhere
off my property.
As I gathered up the poppy stalks, I reflected on the season’s unusual
harvest. Pride is a common enough emotion among gardeners at this time
of year—that, and a continuing amazement at what it is possible to
create, virtually out of nothing, in one’s garden. I still marvel each
summer at the achievement of a Bourbon rose or even a beefsteak
tomato—how the gardener can cause nature to yield up something so
specifically attractive to the human eye or nose or taste bud. So it was
with these astonishing poppies: how can it be that such an
inconsequential speck of seed could yield a fruit in my garden with the
power to lift pain, alter consciousness, “make sadness go away”?
We have the scientist’s explanation: the alkaloids in opium consist of
complex molecules identical to the molecules that our brain produces to
cope with pain and reward itself with pleasure, though it seems to me
that this is one of those scientific explanations that only compounds
the mystery it purports to solve. For what are the odds that a molecule
produced by a flower out in the world would turn out to hold the precise
key required to unlock the physiological mechanism governing the
economy of pleasure and pain in my brain? There is something miraculous
about such a correspondence between nature and mind, though it too must
have an explanation. It might be the result of sheer molecular accident.
But it seems more likely that it is the result of a little of that and
then a whole lot of co-evolution: one theory holds that Papaver
somniferum is a flower whose evolution has been directly influenced by
the pleasure, and relief from pain, it happened to give a certain
primate with a gift for horticulture and experiment. The flowers that
gave people the most pleasure were the ones that produced the most
offspring. It’s not all that different from the case of the Bourbon rose
or the beefsteak tomato, two other plants whose evolution has been
guided by the hand of human interest.
There was a second astonishment I registered out there that autumn
afternoon, this one somewhat darker. As I threw my broken stalks on the
compost and fumed them under with a pitchfork, I thought about what it
could possibly mean to say that this plant was “illegal.” I had started
out a few months ago with a seed no more felonious than the one for a
tomato (indeed, they had arrived in the same envelope), and, after
planting and watering it, thinning and weeding and performing all the
other ordinary acts of gardening, I had ended up with a flower that
rendered its cultivator a criminal. Surely this was an alchemy no less
incredible than the one that had transformed that same seed into a
chemical compound with the power to alter the ratio of pleasure and pain
in my brain. Yet this second transformation had no basis in nature
whatsoever. It is, in fact, the result of nothing more than a particular
legal taxonomy, a classification of certain substances that appear in
nature into categories labeled “licit” and “illicit.” Any such taxonomy,
being the product of a particular culture and history and politics, is
an artificial construct. It’s not difficult to imagine how it might have
been very different than it is.
In fact it once was, and not so long ago. Not far from my garden stands a
very old apple tree, planted early in this century by the farmer who
used to live here, a man named Matyas, who bought this land in 1915.
(The name is pronounced “matches.”) The tree still produces a small crop
of apples each fall, but they’re not very good to eat. From what I’ve
been able to ream, the farmer grew them for the sole purpose of making
hard cider, something most American farmers had done since Colonial
times; indeed, until this century hard cider was probably the most
popular intoxicant—drug, if you will—in this country. It shouldn’t
surprise us that one of the symbols of the Women’s Christian Temperance
Union was an ax; prohibitionists like Carry Nation used to call for the
chopping down of apple trees just like the one in my garden, plants that
in their eyes held some of the same menace that a marijuana plant, or a
poppy flower, holds in the eyes of, say, William Bennett.
Old-timers around here tell me that Joe Matyas used to make the best
applejack in town—100 proof, I once heard. No doubt his cider was
subject to “abuse,” and from 1920 to 1933 its manufacture was a federal
crime under the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. During those
years the farmer violated a federal law every time he made a barrel of
cider. It’s worth noting that during the period of anti-alcohol hysteria
that led to Prohibition, certain forms of opium were as legal and
almost as widely available in this country as alcohol is today. It is
said that members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union would relax
at the end of a day spent crusading against alcohol with their cherished
“women’s tonics,” preparations whose active ingredient was
laudanum—opium. Such was the order of things less than a century ago.
The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the
result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional
imperative. The taxonomy on behalf of which this war is being fought
would be difficult to explain to an extraterrestrial, or even a farmer
like Matyas. Is it the quality of addictiveness that renders a substance
illicit? Not in the case of tobacco, which I am free to grow in this
garden. Curiously, the current campaign against tobacco dwells less on
cigarettes’ addictiveness than on their threat to our health. So is it
toxicity that renders a substance a public menace? Well, my garden is
full of plants—datura and euphorbia, castor beans, and even the stems of
my rhubarb—that would sicken and possibly kill me if I ingested them,
but the government trusts me to be careful. Is it, then, the prospect of
pleasure—of “recreational use”—that puts a substance beyond the pale?
Not in the case of alcohol: I can legally produce wine or hard cider or
beer from my garden for my personal use (though there are regulations
governing its distribution to others). So could it be a drug’s
“mind-altering” properties that make it evil? Certainly not in the case
of Prozac, a drug that, much like opium, mimics chemical compounds
manufactured in the brain.
Arbitrary though the war on drugs may be, the battle against the poppy
is surely its most eccentric front. The exact same chemical compounds in
other hands—those of a pharmaceutical company, say, or a doctor—are
treated as the boon to mankind they most surely are. Yet although the
medical value of my poppies is widely recognized, my failure to heed
what amounts to a set of regulations (that only a pharmaceutical company
may handle these flowers; that only a doctor may dispense their
extracts) and prejudices (that refined alkaloids are superior to crude
ones) governing their production and use makes me not just a scofflaw
but a felon.
Someday we may marvel at the power we’ve invested in these categories,
which seems out of all proportion to their artifice. Perhaps one day the
government won’t care if I want to make a cup of poppy tea for a
migraine, no more than it presently cares if I make a cup of valerian
tea (a tranquilizer made from the roots of Valeriana officinalis) to
help me sleep, or even if I want to make a quart of hard apple cider for
the express purpose of getting drunk. After all, it wasn’t such a long
time ago that the fortunes of the apple and the poppy in this country
were reversed.
As I made sure the stalks were well interred beneath layers of
compost, close enough to the heat at the center of the pile to blast
them beyond recognition, I thought about how little had changed in my
garden since Joe Matyas tended it during Prohibition, a time we rightly
regard as benighted—and wrongly regard as ancient history. If anything,
those of us living through the drug war live in even stranger times,
when certain plants themselves have been outlawed from our gardens with
no regard for what one might or might not be doing with them.
Prohibition never outlawed Joe Matyas’s apple trees (nor did it threaten
this property with confiscation); it wasn’t until Matyas made his cider
that he crossed the line.
But there it was, then as now, a line through the middle of this garden.
Thanks to two national crusades against certain drugs that can be easily
produced in it, both he and I found a way to violate federal law
without so much as stepping off the property, and jeopardized our
personal freedom simply by exercising it. In addition to inhabiting this
particular corner of the earth, Matyas and I presumably had a few other
things in common. There is, for example, the desire to occasionally
alter the textures of consciousness, though I wonder if that might not
be universal.
And then there’s this: the refusal to accept that what happens in our
gardens, not to mention in our houses, our bodies, and our minds, is
anyone’s business but our own. Fifteen years ago, when I first moved
into this place, some of the crumbling outbuildings dotting the property
still bore crudely lettered warnings directed, I liked to think, at the
dreaded “Revenuers” and anyone else the old farmer judged a threat to
his privacy—to his liberty. KEEP OUT! went one, an angry scrawl painted
in red on the side of a shed. My sentiments exactly.
Harper's Magazine, April 1, 1997