Throughout Pollan’s work he explores how some plants and the drugs they produce come to be criminalized while others are permitted and even celebrated. This issue is particularly pertinent in his work on poppies and opium, which was published in the 1990s when the war on drugs was at its peak in the US. In this piece Pollan argues that law enforcement’s view of drugs, including the opium he was growing in his own garden’s poppies, was reductive and lacks understanding about different plants and drugs and how their properties may be used in constructive ways. Pollan argues that prohibiting drug use does not stop people from using drugs, writing, “Criminalizing drugs has done little to discourage their use or to lower rates of addiction and death from overdose” (17). Rather than view drug use as licit or illicit, Pollan claims that we should be focused on constructing healthy and beneficial relationships with different kinds of plants and drugs, whether from our gardens or the pharmacy.

According to Pollan, the US’s punitive approach to prohibiting drugs and punishing drug users is indicative of its “brutally simplistic narratives” about plants and drugs (5). He argues that other cultures, such as the ancient Greeks, were better able to comprehend “the two-faced nature of drugs” (5).