The ability to draw and patrol distinctions of this kind becomes critical in a society like ours, with its two thriving multi-billion-dollar drug cultures. Everyone understands that licit and illicit drugs are not the same. How much easier things would be if, instead of having to lump them all under the rubric of “drugs,” we had one word for the beneficent class of molecules to which Viagra and Prozac belong, and another for the pernicious class that contains cocaine and cannabis.

The problem is that there is a long history of molecules getting switched out of one drug culture and into the other. Alcohol, for instance, has spent time in both cultures in this century. For part of the time that alcohol resided in the bad drug culture, opium, now evil, occupied a prominent place in the good drug culture, where it was dispensed by reputable pharmaceutical firms. More recently LSD and MDMA (aka ecstasy), both born in the good drug culture, have found themselves exiled to the bad. Occasionally the drug traffic flows in the opposite direction. After spending the last few years firmly ensconced on the demon side of the drug divide, cannabis has lately got a toehold on the therapeutic side, at least in the half-dozen states that have legalized medical marijuana. Earlier this year the Institute of Medicine announced that for a small class of patients, cannabis did indeed have therapeutic value.

What we have here, then, is a drug war being fought on behalf of a set of distinctions—a taxonomy of chemicals that, far from being eternal or absolute, has actually been shaped by historical accident, cultural prejudice and institutional imperative. You can imagine an alternative history in which Viagra wound up on the other side of the line—had it, say, been cooked up in an uptown drug lab and sold first on the street under the name Hardy Boy.

You would be hard-pressed to explain the taxonomy of chemicals underpinning the drug war to an extraterrestrial. Is it, for example, addictiveness that causes this society to condemn a drug? (No; nicotine is legal, and millions of Americans have battled addictions to prescription drugs.) So then, our inquisitive alien might ask, is safety the decisive factor? (Not really; over-the-counter and prescription drugs kill more than 45,000 Americans every year while, according to The New England Journal of Medicine, “There is no risk of death from smoking marijuana.”) Is it drugs associated with violent behavior that your society condemns? (If so, alcohol would still be illegal.) Perhaps, then, it is the promise of pleasure that puts a drug beyond the pale? (That would once again rule out alcohol, as well as Viagra.) Then maybe the molecules you despise are the ones that alter the texture of consciousness, or even a human’s personality? (Tell that to someone who has been saved from depression by Prozac.)

At this point our extraterrestrial would probably throw up his appendages and ask, Can we at least say that the drugs you approve of all have a capital letter at the beginning of their names and a TM at the end?

Historians of the future will wonder how a people possessed of such a deep faith in the power of drugs also found themselves fighting a war against certain other drugs with not-dissimilar powers. The media are filled with gauzy pharmaceutical ads promising not just relief from pain but also pleasure and even fulfillment; at the same time, Madison Avenue is working equally hard to demonize other substances on behalf of a “drug-free America.” The more we spend on our worship of the good drugs ($20 billion on psychoactive prescription drugs last year), the more we spend warring against the evil ones ($17 billion the same year). We hate drugs. We love drugs. Or could it be that we hate the fact that we love drugs?

To listen to the storm of comment surrounding George W. Bush’s “irresponsible youth,” one might reasonably conclude that no upstanding American has taken an illicit drug since 1974 or so. Illegal drugs have been so thoroughly demonized that the only way a person can talk about his drug use in public (in private is a different matter) is by drawing bright lines in time: it was a different moment, I was a different person. Thus we have a tortuous taxonomy of self to go along with our tortuous taxonomy of chemistry.

Every time a politician finds himself personally ensnared in the drug issue—finds himself, that is, on the wrong side of the drug war’s battle line between Us and Them—an uncomfortable truth threatens to burst into public view: in this war there is no Them. The enemy in the drug war is Us—our faith in the power of drugs to bring us pleasure, to alter the given textures of consciousness, even to gratify the (unspeakable) wish to get high. These are qualities hard to accept in oneself, despite the fact that we humans have indulged these desires since time immemorial. It’s much easier to talk instead about political hypocrisy or youthful indiscretion. And so these scandals invariably devolve into dramas about the virtue of the candidate rather than that of the drug war itself. Candidates come and go; the war must go on.

Since November, when voters in California overwhelmingly approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, it has been legal under state law for any “seriously ill” Californian to obtain marijuana upon the recommendation of a physician. Ballot initiatives are a famously messy way to make law, however, and the language of Prop 215, which took shape in the marijuana-smoke-filled rooms of San Francisco’s notorious Cannabis Buyers Club, is even wispier than most. It doesn’t explain exactly how the marijuana is supposed to find its way from the field to the patient without breaking state laws not addressed by Prop 215. During the campaign, California’s Attorney General, Dan Lungren, had predicted “legal anarchy” if Prop 215 were to pass.

Sergeant Savage’s job is to make sure that doesn’t happen, at least not within the San Jose city limits. Which is what brings him to Suite 9 of this professional building, crouched amid the low-slung sprawl of bungalows on the north side of town. He has come to present the Police Department’s new “Medical Marijuana Dispensary Regulations” to Peter Baez and Jesse Garcia, the proprietors of what will soon be the nation’s first municipally licensed medical-marijuana dispensary. (Clubs like the one in San Francisco operate with the tacit approval of local authorities.)

Unlike many of the other cannabis dispensaries that have sprung up since the passage of 215, San Jose’s has nothing clublike or countercultural about it: no Grateful Dead tunes on the sound system, and not even a whiff of marijuana smoke in the air. “This is a no-smoking building,” Peter Baez explains, and Baez, a slender 33-year-old colon cancer patient who smokes marijuana to relieve the effects of chemotherapy, is dead earnest about playing by the rules—both the old ones, and the new ones.

San Jose’s District Attorney has called Baez and Garcia “the Eagle Scouts” of medical marijuana. As Baez tells it, this is not a particularly easy role to play. “I’ve got growers calling every day offering me free bud”; in exchange, they want a piece of paper designating them as “medical-marijuana growers,” which may or may not afford them some legal protection—no one really knows. The center, which is not-for-profit and operates on a shoestring, could surely use the free pot, but Baez is reluctant to do business with what he calls “the criminal element.” When it’s not growers looking to make a deal, or the occasional forged prescription (which Baez dutifully reports to Sergeant Savage), it’s all the “Vinnies from New York” phoning in their extravagant offers of start-up capital—for what could make a better organized-crime front than a licensed marijuana dispensary?

And then there are the new rules that Sergeant Savage has come to discuss. Most of the Police Department’s regulations seem straightforward enough, if somewhat cognitively dissonant in the midst of a drug war that has made marijuana a prime target. (Six hundred thousand Americans were arrested for marijuana crimes in 1995, an all-time record.) The new rules cover such things as the approved way to inventory marijuana plants; the maximum amount of marijuana a client can buy in a week (one ounce) and the provision of childproof containers. There is only one regulation that troubles Baez: the city has decreed that all marijuana dispensed by the center must be grown on the premises.

Savage explained to Baez and Garcia that “we can’t have you driving down from San Francisco with your trunk filled with marijuana. Prop 215 didn’t address the issue of transportation, so that’s still a felony. Which means you’re going to have to grow it all here.” Baez and Garcia had been driving their marijuana down from San Francisco, where they bought it wholesale ($3,200 a pound) from Dennis Peron, the controversial pioneer of California’s medical-marijuana movement and the proprietor of the San Francisco Buyers Club. Peron’s club is exactly the sort of operation –a loosely run, round-the-clock pot party that sells 20 to 30 pounds of marijuana each week—that gives the city fathers of San Jose nightmares. Savage and his superiors seem genuinely committed to making Proposition 215 succeed, but they insist on going by the book, such as it is.

“I told Scott gardening wasn’t my forte,” Baez recalls, “and that we don’t have the space to grow on site.” Savage wasn’t about to yield, but he did want to be helpful. So he mentioned that as part of his recent research into marijuana he had toured NASA’s Ames Research Center in nearby Mountain View, where engineers are developing “some very sophisticated hydroponic growing systems for the space program. They showed us how you can now go from seed to head of lettuce in 17 days.” Savage, who is almost boyishly enthusiastic on the subject of marijuana cultivation, mentioned that the NASA engineers were willing to help Baez and Garcia design a state-of-the-art marijuana grow, and had estimated it could be built for about $50 a square foot. He gave Baez a number to call.

But Baez had other worries besides horticultural know-how. “What about Flower Therapy?”

Flower Therapy is a new cannabis club in San Francisco that operates with the approval of the city’s District Attorney and Department of Public Health. The club also grows marijuana on site—or at least it did until early one morning in April, when Federal agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration kicked down the door, confiscating more than 300 plants and the equipment used to grow them. Baez said to Savage: “You’re telling me I have to grow marijuana on site, when the D.E.A. is raiding clubs for doing exactly that. Flower Therapy had 331 plants chopped up—I can’t afford to lose all my medicine like that.” Today, playing by the book in San Jose means breaking the law in Washington: under Federal law, which is undisturbed by Proposition 215, the crime of cultivating 100 marijuana plants carries a five-year mandatory minimum sentence. (Provided, of course, a Federal prosecutor could win a conviction from a California jury. Which may explain why the U.S. attorney has so far declined to bring any charges against the proprietors of Flower Therapy, two of whom are AIDS patients.)

Sergeant Savage acknowledged that he couldn’t do anything about the D.E.A., but he wouldn’t budge on the issue of on-site cultivation: “This is going to be the rule in San Jose.” He did offer to fax a letter to the D.E.A. saying that the Santa Clara club was in full compliance with zoning and police regulations, but couldn’t make any promises it would work.

Like characters in an improbable hollywood buddy movie, Peter Baez and Sergeant Savage, the pot dealer and the cop, have been thrown together by Prop 215, as they both struggle to chart a course through the peculiar new landscape created by legalized medical marijuana. The path these two have chosen is notable for its almost punctilious legalism, and many communities in California are looking to San Jose as a model. But there are others –most notably San Francisco’s Dennis Peron—who are heading off in a different direction, and who regard San Jose’s attempt at legitimacy as quixotic. “Some people are trying to forget that, even with 215, dispensing medical marijuana is still an act of civil disobedience,” Peron told me. “Isn’t that the message of Flower Therapy?”

All three would agree, however, that they’re standing together on a kind of frontier, a decidedly gray area where the old rules of engagement in the drug war have been suspended (sort of), but where the new rules are still being worked out, sometimes painfully. That’s mainly because the process is playing itself out under a cloud of Federal disapproval: the Clinton Administration—contending that medical issues should not be decided by referenda, and concerned about pot smoking by teen-agers—is working hard to insure the failure of California’s experiment with legal marijuana. Washington is worried that California will serve, as it often has, as a bellwether for the rest of the nation. Already Proposition 215 has forced the issue of medical marijuana onto the national agenda. A half-dozen states are likely to cast votes on similar initiatives in 1998, and another half-dozen State Legislatures are currently debating medical-marijuana bills. Moreover, as the Administration recognizes (and as medical-marijuana advocates will acknowledge, though mostly off the record), much more is at stake here than the provision of an herbal remedy to a handful of sick Californians. California’s experiment with medical marijuana could well turn out to be a turning point in the drug war, if for no other reason than it is rapidly transforming what has long been a simplistic monologue about drugs—Just say no—into a complex conversation between the people and their Government.

So far, the most compelling voices in that conversation belong to the patients, the doctors, the growers and the cops who together are struggling to carve out a place for legal marijuana in the face of fierce opposition from Washington. I recently traveled to Northern California, the seedbed of the medical-marijuana movement, to hear what they were saying, and learn what their experiment might mean for the rest of us.

The Patients

The stories of sick people have propelled the cause of medical marijuana. Proposition 215 was framed by its supporters as a question of patients’ rights, and their most effective television ads told the stories of cancer patients for whom smoking marijuana brought dramatic relief. “I’ve been a registered nurse for over 40 years,” began one spot, shot at a grave site, “but when my husband, J. J., was dying of cancer, I felt helpless.

“The nausea from his chemotherapy was so awful it broke my heart. So I broke the law and got him marijuana. It worked—he could eat. He had an extra year of life. Prop 215 will allow patients like J. J. to use the marijuana without becoming criminals. Vote yes on 215. God forbid, someone you love may need it.”

How do you argue with such a story without seeming heartless? The opponents of Prop 215, including the Clinton Administration’s drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, decided they couldn’t. They attacked the hidden agenda of the medical-marijuana movement (“a stalking horse for legalization,” McCaffrey called it), the deep pockets of their out-of-state backers (including George Soros and Laurance Rockefeller) and, above all, the “wrong message” that legalizing medical marijuana would send to children. But they consistently refused to appear with or debate medical-marijuana patients. Thus the patients framed the political narrative.

Before the Prop 215 campaign, Americans had focused exclusively on the victims of drugs; now they were meeting victims of the war against drugs, and these people looked a lot like people they knew. The old stories of children with drug problems were suddenly displaced by stories of dying parents in need of pain relief. And these stories resonated with the experience of voters, a third of whom told pollsters they personally knew someone who used marijuana for medical reasons.

In California I met scores of patients who credit marijuana with dimming their pain, quelling their nausea, firing their appetites and quieting their seizures; I also met a handful of people who believe marijuana is keeping them alive. Keith Vines is one patient who has no doubt on that score; nor does his doctor. Vines told me his story over a 16-ounce rib-eye steak at Harris’ Restaurant in Pacific Heights. I mention the detail because Vines is an AIDS patient afflicted with wasting syndrome; for someone in his situation, polishing off a big steak (along with a Caesar salad, scalloped potatoes, sugar snap peas and a slab of pastry) counts as an accomplishment.

Keith Vines has had to “come out” three separate times in his 46 years. The first time was 16 years ago, when he told his wife –the mother of his 2-year-old son—that he was gay, a fact he realized he’d been repressing since high school. At the time, he was an Air Force captain, working for the military as a malpractice lawyer at Scott Airbase Medical Center in Belleville, Ill. Soon after coming out he moved to San Francisco, where he went to work for the city as an assistant district attorney. For two years he served on the Federal Narcotics Strike Force, successfully prosecuting what at the time had been the second-biggest drug case in the city’s history.

Not long after arriving in San Francisco, in 1983, Vines was infected with H.I.V. By 1993, he had developed wasting syndrome, a little-understood metabolic change that causes patients to lose rapidly not only fat but also muscle tissue. It is often a death sentence. “In a matter of months I dropped from 195 pounds to 150,” Vines said. “You wouldn’t have recognized me; it wasn’t the death camps, quite, but close.” This was hard to believe: the man before me looked as robust and thickly muscled as a football player. “People at work started asking me about my health. So that was my second outing—as someone with AIDS.”

Like many AIDS patients, Vines takes 10 to 15 medications a day. Many of these medicines cause debilitating nausea and suppress appetite; and yet many of these drugs must be taken on a full stomach—and missing even a single dose can be disastrous. Vines was dying a slow death by emaciation when he managed to get into a experimental trial that was treating wasting syndrome with human growth hormone, a treatment that has recently been approved by the F.D.A. His doctors explained that for the new drug to have any chance of working, it was essential that he eat three meals a day—something he found impossible to do.

Dr. Lisa Capaldini, Vines’s primary physician, suggested he try Marinol to stimulate his appetite. Marinol is a synthetic form of THC—the principal active ingredient in marijuana. It was approved by the F.D.A. initially as an anti-emetic for chemotherapy patients and then, in 1993, as an appetite stimulant for AIDS patients. But like many people who take it, Vines found that Marinol took a long time to kick in and that, when it did, the effects were far too powerful and long-lasting. “One capsule would make me feel stoned for hours,” he said. “Sometimes I’d be too stoned to eat, or I’d just fall asleep.”

Opponents of medical marijuana often point to Marinol as an superior alternative; indeed, it appears that the Government speeded the development and approval of the drug as a way to relieve the political pressure to legalize medical marijuana, which was building in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. (Before AIDS, the F.D.A. actually administered a small, quiet medical-marijuana program in which a dozen or so patients received pot grown on a Federally run farm in Mississippi. But during the late 80′s the AIDS epidemic flooded the F.D.A. with applications that it would have been politically awkward to approve in the midst of the war against drugs. The program has since been closed down, though eight original patients still receive their monthly allotment of marijuana cigarettes.)

But many AIDS patients find, as Vines did, that the pills don’t do the job. When it became clear Marinol wasn’t working for Vines, Lisa Capaldini mentioned to him that many of her patients were getting better results from inhaled marijuana. They found they could more easily titrate, or control, the dose, simply by adjusting the number of puffs. This conversation took place two years before Prop 215; didn’t she feel funny recommending marijuana to a district attorney?

“Not really,” Capaldini told me. “Because when I looked at Keith I didn’t see a district attorney. I saw a patient who was dying.”

Vines didn’t find the decision to try marijuana particularly difficult, either. “I’m hanging off a cliff, staring at death, and my doctor’s telling me this might help,” he recalled. “It’s against the law, yes, but I’m not thinking of myself as a prosecutor. I’m a man fighting for his life.”

So Keith Vines came out for a third time, telling his colleagues in the D.A.’s office that he felt compelled to break the same drug laws he’d been working to uphold. San Francisco being San Francisco, everyone—including, eventually, his boss, District Attorney Terrence Hallinan—was supportive.

For Vines, the hard part was obtaining a supply of marijuana without finding his face in the paper. It’s difficult to imagine Vines, who probably would not object to my describing him as something of a square, riding up in the Jerry Garcia Memorial Elevator to the third floor of the San Francisco Buyers Club—a smoky loft done in High Crash Pad, circa 1969. This is where the club’s patrons place their orders from the marijuana menu board (Humboldt Green: $65 an eighth; marijuana lemon squares: $5 a piece) and, if they choose, light up and pass out. Keith Vines got his eighth to go, and went.

Vines had tried pot once or twice in college and R.O.T.C. (“I tried it and, yes, I inhaled,” a quip I must have endured three dozen times in California; the relation of the President’s past to his policy shadows every conversation about marijuana here.) But marijuana had never been a part of his life until now. He began taking a puff or two from a pipe right before dinner—just enough to make him hungry without getting stoned. It worked, and very quickly Vines began gaining weight. “I saw myself in the mirror literally coming back to life,” he said. “It was the growth hormone that put on the weight, but it would never have worked if the marijuana hadn’t given me back my appetite.

“I understand the drug laws, I know why marijuana is illegal,” Vines went on to say. “I certainly don’t want my 17-year-old son smoking it—we have a serious drug problem with our youth in this country.” He pointed out that legal opiates like morphine have done nothing to undermine the war against heroin, and suggested the same would be true for medical marijuana. “They can still have their war on drugs,” he said. “Just take this out of it. This is medicine.”

If the F.D.A. ever does approve marijuana, it will probably be as an anti-emetic and appetite stimulant for people like Keith Vines. But of course Proposition 215 opened the way not only for them but also for anyone suffering from “any other illness for which marijuana provides relief,” and a whole assortment of Californians are squeezing through that door.

My notebooks are stuffed not only with the testimonies of cancer and AIDS patients who vouched for marijuana’s efficacy, but also with those of people suffering from paraplegia; multiple sclerosis; insomnia; post-traumatic stress disorder; anorexia; anxiety; psoriasis, and even drug addiction. The place to interview these less conventional patients is the San Francisco Buyers Club. I spent a couple of hours there one morning, observing the “patient intake” procedure at the club; it was risible.

The staff was eager to show off the new “safeguards” put in place to weed out illegitimate patients—nifty things like photo ID’s with bar codes on them. But if you believe, as Dennis Peron, the club’s proprietor, famously does, that all marijuana use is medical (except by children), the process of evaluating “patients” is bound to lose some of its precision. Even a faded, years-old letter of diagnosis, its type rendered chubby by generations of photocopying, will get you in here. I watched an M.S. patient secure a membership card on the strength of a letter not even from a doctor but a social worker. When I pointed this out to the intake staffer, he gave the letter a closer look. “Good point. Not an M.D. But would you please just look at this man?” The man was pretzeled into his wheelchair, his arms and hands too badly bent to sign his name to the application form. “I’m sorry, but we’re just too compassionate here to turn a man like this away just because he lacks the proper paperwork.”

What I was witnessing here was something other than medicine—it was, in fact, a lot closer to religion. Peron is California’s evangelist of marijuana, and he has drawn around him a following—people sick in body or soul—who come to his church, many of them daily, to be healed by the laying on of smoke.

I spoke to one 31-year-old regular, Robert Boe, who will never be a poster boy for medical marijuana. He is a moist-eyed man who introduced himself to me as a “masseuse-painter-poet-artist”; he comes to the club every day, and evidently finds some form of relief from his torments. He told me he has had “intractable pain” since 1995, when he was stabbed in the chest during a mugging and suffered “permanent nerve damage”; the pot helps, Boe said, “but I come here for the community too.” Today he has brought a poem he wrote in honor of Peron’s birthday.

Dennis Peron may well be the world’s biggest pot dealer, but he is also, I think, perfectly sincere in his conviction that “all marijuana is medicinal,” the logic of which seems a shade less absurd the longer you spend in his smoky tabernacle. (The smoke could have something to do with it.) It all depends on how you define medicine, what you mean by healing. When I ask Dennis Peron about all those people I’ve known who smoke marijuana strictly for fun, he asks me to consider: “But what is fun? Why do they need it? It’s obvious: something is missing from their lives.”

Peron’s “practice” of medicine may be a joke, not to mention an insult to people like Keith Vines, who is not smoking marijuana to compensate for “something missing” in his life. But if he’s a charlatan, to many in California he’s a heroic one. It was Peron, after all, who was willing to sell Keith Vines the marijuana his doctor said he needed when doing so was still a crime.

The Doctors

Mention “December 30″ to any physician in the state of California and he or she will know precisely what you’re talking about. That was the day when Gen. Barry McCaffrey, flanked by Attorney General Janet Reno, Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala and a D.E.A. official stood before the television cameras to deliver an unprecedented threat to the doctors of California. According to a statement issued at the news conference, “a practitioner’s action of recommending or prescribing Schedule I controlled substances”—like marijuana—. . .”will lead to administrative action by the Drug Enforcement Administration to revoke the practitioner’s registration.” Though doctors are licensed by the states, without a D.E.A. registration they cannot prescribe medicine—cannot, in effect, practice. The new policy also threatened to criminally prosecute doctors who recommend medical marijuana, and to exclude from Medicare and Medicaid.

Exactly how the Clinton Administration would deal with the passage of Proposition 215 had been a lively subject of speculation. The Administration took a hard line during the campaign, which surprised none of Prop 215′s proponents: Clinton could scarcely afford to appear “soft on drugs” at a time when Bob Dole was getting some traction with the issue. One of the Dole campaign’s most effective and often-run spots featured old footage of the President muttering that he regretted not having inhaled. Once Clinton was safely re-elected, however, some in the medical-marijuana movement held out hope the Administration would play down the issue, treat California as an anomaly or, possibly, an experiment.

But the history of the drug war is a history of increasing Federal power (it had its origins in Richard Nixon’s desire to “federalize” the crime issue), and Proposition 215 (along with a similar initiative that passed in Arizona) posed an unprecedented threat to that power that had to be turned back. Moreover, Clinton’s advisers reportedly feared that medical marijuana could become the “gays in the military” of his second-term transition—a tangential but distracting social issue that threatened to expose him to attack from the right. The Administration reportedly considered going to court to challenge the California law, but it discovered it had no constitutional leg to stand on—a state being free to amend its criminal code. The decision was then made to go after the doctors, the one group in California firmly under Federal control.

Coming in the middle of the slow news week between Christmas and New Year’s, the new Government initiative could not have made much more noise. At the news conference, the phalanx of officials laid out the Government’s case against medical marijuana. The passage of Proposition 215 (and Proposition 200 in Arizona) “poses a threat” to the Federal war against drugs, and the officials took pains to reassert the Federal Government’s powers, both to enforce the drug laws (“We want to make clear,” Attorney General Reno said, “that Federal law still applies”) and to regulate prescription drugs. McCaffrey spoke of the Federal Government’s special responsibility to insure the safety and effectiveness of medicine through a drug-approval process that had “prevented thalidomide and Laetrile and other nonsense substances from going in front of the American public.” Proposition 215 “is not a medical proposition,” McCaffrey told reporters. “This is the legalization of drugs we’re concerned about.”

McCaffrey made much the same point when I spoke to him earlier this month. He explained that “some very cunning people have displaced the argument for legalization—which Americans overwhelmingly reject—to one that is more acceptable.” He attributes support in California, and elsewhere, for medical marijuana to the fact that, understandably, “a lot of Americans are worried about pain management.”

McCaffrey went on to express concern about the referendum process that legalized medical marijuana. Proposition 215 “isn’t part of the medical process—there’s no physical exam, no prescription,” he says. “An aromatherapist, a ‘care giver,’ even a patient can grow their own in the backyard. We don’t tell people to grow their own heart medicine! We don’t decide flight rules for L.A. airport by plebiscite!”

McCaffrey is worried too about the effect medical marijuana will have on marijuana use among teen-agers. “As the fear of marijuana continues to go down,” he told me, “use among young people goes up.” Marijuana use among teen-agers has, in fact, been rising in recent years, though it has not reached the levels (35 percent and more) seen in the 70′s. “Kids are hearing that marijuana is a medicine, that it can cure these various illnesses. How can anything that’s medicine be that bad?” McCaffrey subscribes to the theory that marijuana is a “gateway” drug, and he cited recent studies that have found a statistical correlation between teen-age marijuana use and later addiction to harder drugs. Anything that diminishes the fear of marijuana should trouble us, he argues, which is why Prop 215 sends a “terrible message” to the nation’s youth.

But the loudest message of the news conference on Dec. 30 was the one delivered to the doctors of California, who heard the Attorney General of the United States tell them that the act of recommending marijuana to a patient could cost them their livelihood. And in the short term, the threat had the intended effect: doctors stopped writing letters of recommendation; many even stopped discussing marijuana with their patients, or returning calls from cannabis clubs seeking to confirm diagnoses. More than one doctor told me that patients had probably been better off before Proposition 215, when doctors had actually felt freer to recommend marijuana.

It is true that marijuana had been a quiet, relatively uncontroversial part of American medical practice for years before Proposition 215, though it’s hard to know exactly how commonly it was recommended. When, in the mid-80′s, a D.E.A. administrative law judge held hearings on rescheduling marijuana as a Schedule II drug so doctors could prescribe it, he concluded that marijuana already had an “accepted medical use,” especially among doctors treating cancer patients. (“Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man,” Judge Francis Young wrote in a 1988 decision that was promptly overruled by the D.E.A.) One Harvard Medical School survey of 2,000 oncologists conducted in 1991 found that 44 percent had recommended marijuana to their patients. I’m told it is not at all uncommon to smell marijuana smoke in the cancer wards of American hospitals.

Talking to doctors about marijuana, I heard little of the evangelical fervor I came to expect from patients. With the exception of AIDS specialists, few regarded marijuana as much more than a “second or third line treatment” for their “refractory patients”—the ones that don’t respond to conventional medicines. Many recognize the therapeutic value of THC, but are troubled by the “delivery system”—inhaled smoke that contains some 400 poorly understood compounds, several of which are carcinogens.

Dr. Debasish Tripathy, a prominent breast cancer specialist in San Francisco, told me he typically has a handful of patients for whom marijuana is the only drug that will quell the nausea induced by chemotherapy—nausea so debilitating that patients will sometimes choose to discontinue treatment rather than endure it. Tripathy regards marijuana as a treatment of last resort (though since Dec. 30 he has declined to recommend it even in those cases), but he also emphasizes just how important it is to have such drugs in the pharmacopeia. “The whole notion of a ‘best medicine’ is erroneous,” Tripathy explains, because patients vary so in their response to drugs. “Indeed, the phrase ‘best medicine’ belies the concept of individualized care.”

Like many of the doctors I spoke to, Tripathy seems somewhat mystified by the Government’s intransigence on the subject of marijuana, particularly in view of its comparative safety. “Marijuana is far less toxic than many of the medicines I prescribe to my cancer patients,” Tripathy points out. Doctors are accustomed to objectively weighing the benefits and risks of any treatment, and the unwillingness of the Government simply to let science decide the issue of medical marijuana is incomprehensible to them. Tripathy would like to see more studies, especially trials comparing the effectiveness of Marinol and smoked marijuana in combating nausea. Dr. Donald Abrams, an AIDS researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, has been trying to organize just such a trial for four years. Though the F.D.A. has approved his study, the D.E.A. and the National Institute of Drug Abuse have refused to give him access to the marijuana he needs to carry it out.

In the wake of 215′s passage, General McCaffrey began calling for “science not ideology” to settle the medical-marijuana debate. McCaffrey has ordered a comprehensive National Academy of Sciences review of the literature on the subject, but the timing of the study—it won’t be completed until shortly after the next round of ballot initiatives in 1998—prompts many advocates to dismiss it as a clever delaying tactic. Even so, McCaffrey’s call for more science is significant, for it initiates a process that might prove ineluctable. A similar review conducted during the Carter Administration wound up lending support to the medical use of marijuana. (Though it was suppressed as a result.)

For many California doctors, what the Government dismisses as “anecdotal evidence” for the efficacy of marijuana is of course just an unflattering name for their own clinical experience, which has already been encouraging enough to justify the drug’s use without waiting for large clinical trials or F.D.A. approval. This is perhaps particularly true among doctors who treat AIDS, a corner of American medicine that has been especially open-minded about experimental treatments and impatient with the traditional drug-approval process. “Many of us have been willing to work ahead of the data on AIDS,” Capaldini told me. “Much of the progress that’s been made in the last few years has come from our willingness to try nonstandard medicines.” She cited as an example the use of hormones to combat wasting syndrome.

Doctors who treat AIDS are by far the ones most enthusiastic about medical marijuana. Dr. Virginia Cafaro is a physician with the Conant Medical Group, the largest AIDS practice in San Francisco. Her first encounter with medical marijuana came seven or eight years ago, when her patients began reporting that smoking pot helped relieve their nausea and stimulated their appetite. “I looked into it and found it was being used by oncologists,” she told me, “so I began recommending it for cases where nothing else was working.”

But if the lack of big clinical trials and F.D.A. approval haven’t inhibited Dr. Cafaro from using medical marijuana in her practice, General McCaffrey’s Dec. 30 threat certainly has. “Since the threats by Federal officials,” she has written, “I have avoided directly broaching the subject of medical marijuana even with patients who could, in my judgment, obtain marked relief” from it. Other doctors have adopted a “tell, don’t chart” policy: they recommend marijuana, but don’t write the information down, either in a letter or on the patient’s chart. Some told me they now look askance at any new patient who inquires about marijuana, wondering if perhaps he might be an undercover D.E.A. agent.

The doctors’ paranoia was further fueled in January, when Dr. Robert Mastroianni, a family physician in Pollack Pines, near Sacramento, received an early-morning visit from two D.E.A. agents. They produced a letter of recommendation he’d written for medical marijuana after the passage of 215, and asked to see his D.E.A. registration number. The agents tried to interrogate him, but the doctor refused to answer questions without a lawyer present. A local pharmacist was also questioned by D.E.A. agents, who asked to review Mastroianni’s prescription records.

Later in January, Mastroianni and numerous other doctors supported a dozen California physicians (including Cafaro and Tripathy) who filed a class-action suit challenging the Government’s policy of punishing doctors who recommend marijuana. The suit argued that the threats made by General McCaffrey and others on Dec. 30 violated the First Amendment right of doctors to speak freely to their patients. The Government responded that doctors were free to “discuss” marijuana, but not to “recommend” it, which was tantamount to aiding and abetting a Federal crime. Federal Judge Fern Smith disagreed: “The First Amendment allows physicians to discuss and advocate medical marijuana even though use of marijuana itself is illegal.” In April the judge issued a preliminary injunction barring the Government from threatening or taking any action against doctors who recommend marijuana to their patients. The Government may eventually prevail at trial, but for the time being it has lost its principal weapon against Proposition 215. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence, but it was only days after Judge Smith issued her temporary restraining order against the Government that the D.E.A. raided Flower Therapy—a raid that gave Californians a striking reminder of the continued relevance of Federal power.

Even before Judge Smith’s injunction, the Administration’s tactic had begun to look like a strategic blunder. For one thing, it has politicized the medical establishment on medical marijuana in a way it hadn’t been before. Prominent medical journals leapt to the defense of California’s doctors, including the staid New England Journal of Medicine, which in January entered the debate with a uncharacteristically heated editorial that argued: “A Federal policy that prohibits physicians from alleviating suffering by prescribing marijuana for seriously ill patients is misguided, heavy-handed and inhumane.” In May the California Medical Association, which had conspicuously failed to support 215 last fall, announced its support for a bill in the State Legislature to expand the Compassionate Use Act by establishing a medical-marijuana research center at the University of California that would conduct clinical trials.

The Government’s war against doctors may also have played into the hands of its opponents in the drug-policy reform movement. “Going after doctors is the only thing they could have done that was dumber than going after terminal patients,” a leading pro-marijuana strategist told me. “From the beginning our thesis has been that the medical-marijuana issue will get people to start questioning the larger war on drugs. It opens up a contradiction between what the Government has been saying about drugs and what people feel is correct. Dec. 30 opened that contradiction even further. Because how can you really say the drug war is about Americans’ health when you’re going after their doctors?”

The Growers

“Are you kidding? It’s going to be a gold rush out there!” That’s how a pot grower named Jake put it when I asked him if he thought there’d be a lot of marijuana planted in California this summer. Already marijuana is the state’s biggest cash crop, estimated in the early 1990′s at $1.4 billion a year, almost twice the value of the next most lucrative crop, cotton. Proposition 215 has not only expanded the market but also conferred a kind of quasi respectability on marijuana growing that appears to be drawing new legions into the field. They may be in for a rude surprise.

I met Jake at the Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative, where he’d come to drop off two pounds of marijuana grown at an indoor site in California’s Central Valley. Jake, who is 30, just finished up at Berkeley after a stint in the Marine Corps. He’s a tanned, square-jawed, 6-foot-plus jock, California-division, dressed in shorts, rugby shirt and Ray-Bans. Today he has come to market with a harvest of “Bubblegum,” a strain named for its unusually sweet smell, and the scene in the back room of the Oakland co-op has a definite El Exigente flavor to it.

The El Exigente role is played by Jeff Jones, the co-op’s curly-haired 23-year-old proprietor, who uses a loupe to expertly examine the grower’s buds. Magnified, the cannabis flowers are encrusted with yellowish-orange crystals and packed tightly around the stem. Jones is also looking for signs of fungus, a particular concern among his AIDS clientele. He pronounces himself delighted with the quality of Jake’s product, and everyone smiles.

During the winter Jake and his partners grow indoors, both in the Central Valley and Oakland, but in the summer months he moves up to his 40-acre plot in the mountains to the east, to grow outdoors and enjoy nature. Last summer a forest fire swept through, and his 80 plants were discovered by firefighters. They alerted the county narcs, but Jake was able to talk his way out of an arrest. “We just hit it off. It was a male-bonding thing. I told them it was medical marijuana, and that I was growing it for the clubs.” One imagines California law-enforcement officials will be hearing that quite a lot this summer. Indeed, there don’t seem to be any ordinary pot growers left in the state; everybody’s moved into medical marijuana.

Jake says he sells exclusively to the clubs, under contract. Contract marijuana growing is a decidedly curious practice spawned by Proposition 215. A club issues a piece of paper to a grower designating him as a “care giver.” The language of 215 gives patients and their care givers the right to cultivate marijuana; whether a grower unknown to a patient can, in any meaningful sense, be that patient’s care giver seems arguable at best, but that is the operative legal fiction. A typical contract requires growers to sell exclusively to the club; to cultivate fewer than 50 plants; to grow organically, and to fly the Geneva cross over their garden. The price for contract-grown medical marijuana in California is $3,200 a pound, compared with between $5,000 and $7,000 for the other kind. Growers told me the new price was established almost single-handedly by Dennis Peron, who buys enough marijuana to move the market. “If you’re looking for more than $3,200, Dennis won’t even take your call,” one grower grumped to me.

Why are growers willing to accept such a deep discount on a crop the cultivation of which is probably still a state crime, and is undoubtedly still a Federal one? Jake’s experience with his local narcs suggests an answer. Proposition 215 “created an opportunity to grow without being completely paranoid,” he says. Indeed, Jake is feeling so confident these days that he’s thinking of simply notifying the local authorities of his marijuana plot this season to avoid any hassles.

“It’d be nice to be a proper garden,” he says, “and not a covert operation.”

The closest thing to a truly legitimate marijuana garden I saw in California was Valerie Corral’s, tucked into the hills above Santa Cruz in a grove of redwoods overlooking the glittering Pacific. Valerie is herself a medical-marijuana patient, and though her garden was twice raided in the years before 215, the city of Santa Cruz has consistently declined to prosecute her. Indeed, the Mayor of Santa Cruz recently honored Corral by proclamation in appreciation of her work growing marijuana and giving it away to indigent patients through her nonprofit Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana, or WAMM. In Santa Cruz Corral is the Florence Nightingale and Johnny Appleseed of medical marijuana rolled into one.

Corall has suffered from epilepsy since being injured in a freak automobile accident 24 years ago. Doctors put her on a regime of drugs that only partly quieted her grand mal seizures, and marooned her in a permanent narcotic stupor. When her husband, Michael, read an article about a study claiming marijuana smoke controlled seizures in laboratory animals, she gave it a try—and says her seizures stopped completely. Today marijuana is the only drug she uses, taking a puff or two whenever she senses the “aura” that many epileptics experience in the moments before a seizure; without fail, she told me, the mental storm is averted.

Corral was instrumental in persuading the drafters of Proposition 215 to include the provision allowing patients and their care givers to cultivate marijuana. “Unless people can grow their own medical marijuana it’s going to be too expensive,” she explained, as she showed me around her garden late one afternoon. On the terraced hillside surrounding her tiny house, she and Michael tend a menagerie of exotic fruits, vegetables and herbs: tea, figs, Thai basil, guava, passion fruit, ginger and, at one time or another, some 32 varieties of marijuana. Corral offers WAMM members free seedlings so they can grow their own.

The most important reason for growing one’s own marijuana, Corral says, is to stay out of the black market, “where you never know what you’re getting.” The quality of medical marijuana matters deeply to the Corrals. They scrupulously preserve the genetics of the various strains they’ve collected over the years and are working to hybridize new ones geared toward specific ailments.

There are many California growers who, along with smaller growers like Jake and the Corrals, would like nothing better than to see marijuana legalized, this despite the fact that prices would plummet and competition would increase. The cost of doing business would also decline: growers today are forced to maintain a number of small, inefficient gardens at widely dispersed locations in order to protect themselves against crop loss and mandatory minimum sentences, which kick in whenever more than 99 plants are seized. Peter Gorman, the veteran executive editor of High Times, the magazine of marijuana devotees, told me that “the good growers would take it”—legalization—”in a second. They’re confident of their skills and of their genetics—that they’ve got the best product. Sure, if pot were legalized it’d take a lot more work to make the same amount of money, but just think—you could grow it at home, and invite people over to see your garden.”

The Cops

After Jake finished up his business at the Oakland co-op, he offered to give me a lift to my next appointment, which happened to be at the Oakland Police Department. I’d come to interview Lieut. Pete Peterson, who has the job of implementing Proposition 215 in that city, and when I asked him whether a hypothetical grower like Jake would be protected by from prosecution by his contract and red cross, he laughed. “A lot of growers are in for a big surprise this summer,” he said. “If we found anyone in Oakland with 80 plants, we would take them down.” He told me he had no idea where the Oakland co-op was getting its marijuana, but guessed “it’s being grown up in Mendocino, probably by a bunch of hippies my age.”

Peterson, who’s 49 and works in plaid shirt sleeves in a dismal, hot basement office, has been working closely with Jeff Jones over at the co-op to make sure medical marijuana doesn’t become a law-enforcement problem in Oakland. His first visit to the co-op had been memorable: “As soon as you get off the elevator that smell hits you, and all you can think about is, Where’s a door to kick in!” Like Scott Savage, his counterpart in San Jose, Peterson believes the clubs, even though they are not mentioned in Proposition 215, are probably the best way to manage medical marijuana in California. “From a law-enforcement perspective, it’s a lot easier to deal with a single club than with a lot people on the street claiming to be medical-marijuana patients.”

Peterson is a member of the California Narcotic Officers’ Association, which led a fierce campaign against Proposition 215 by statewide police organizations. But now that it is the law, the attitude of the state’s law-enforcement community has mellowed. “I think most law-enforcement people feel pretty comfortable with it now,” I was told by Thomas J. Gorman, the association’s spokesman on medical marijuana. “We don’t have to like it, but we’re going to try to make it work—it’s the law.”

I asked Peterson if the “legal anarchy” predicted by Attorney General Lungren had come to pass. He smiled. Now and then cops will encounter a suspect falsely claiming to be a patient, but by and large, medical marijuana appears well on its way to becoming routine in Oakland. When a police officer picks up someone with a small quantity of marijuana claiming to be a patient, he calls the 24-hour 800 number on the back of the suspect’s Oakland co-op I.D. card; if Jeff Jones can confirm he is a member, he is simply released at the scene. This seems to be common practice in Northern California; in the southern part of the state, however, the police will often proceed with the arrest, forcing a defendant to raise the medical-marijuana defense at trial.

That approach is consistent with the state Attorney General’s official guidelines. Confounding his own predictions, Dan Lungren appears to be making a good-faith effort to implement the new law with as little turmoil as possible; the day after the vote, he issued a set of police procedures governing medical marijuana that, while stringent, certainly gave the lie to the idea that 215 was unworkable. Lungren is thought to be running for Governor, and probably sees no point in bucking the voter’s will on medical marijuana; also, it would do his political future little good if legal anarchy actually were to break out on his watch. No doubt law-enforcement problems lie ahead (especially with regard to cultivation and transportation), and much about 215 remains to be adjudicated (regarding the legal status of the clubs, and the question of whether a medical-marijuana defense should be raised at arraignment or trial), but so far the most extraordinary thing about medical marijuana in California law enforcement is just how quickly it is becoming ordinary.

One evening near the end of my trip to California, the subject of medical marijuana came up at a dinner with relatives in Berkeley. I noticed that my 12-year-old nephew was listening intently as I talked about the place of marijuana in the lives of people like Keith Vines and Valerie Corral; he looked perplexed, and I was deciding whether to drop the subject when he broke in: “Wait a minute. Marijuana medicine? I thought marijuana ruins your life. So how can it be also medicine?”

My nephew’s questions are ones many Americans will soon be weighing.

In the years since the 1982 speech in which Ronald Reagan declared war on drugs, marijuana—the only drug he mentioned by name—has moved to the very center of that war. Law-enforcement officials like to talk about their splashy victories over heroin and cocaine, but in fact the everyday, slogging battles that make up the modern drug war revolve largely around marijuana. The greatest number of arrests are for marijuana crimes, and those account for a significant portion of the asset forfeitures that Police Department budgets have come to rely on. Marijuana is the primary focus of drug-prevention efforts in the schools and drug-testing in the workplace. Indeed, it may not be possible to have a drug war on the scale we now do without illicit marijuana. Remove the millions of marijuana users from the ranks of illicit drug users and we would be left with “a drug abuse epidemic” involving roughly two million regular heroin and cocaine users—a public health problem, to be sure, but hardly one big enough to justify spending $16 billion a year.

Perhaps this explains why not only the Clinton Administration but also players on both sides of the drug issue—from groups like the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA) to Americans for Medical Rights and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)—have decided that the future of the national drug war may well hinge on the issue of medical marijuana. For the first time since the 1970′s, when NORML had the ear of President Carter and a handful of states were decriminalizing marijuana, an actual, two-sided political battle has broken out around the issue of drug policy in America.

The passage of 215 has galvanized supporters of the drug war, who have recently scored victories over medical marijuana in Arizona (where Proposition 200 was all but gutted by the Legislature) and in Ohio, where a medical-marijuana bill that was

passed without controversy in the last legislative session was suddenly repealed. Anti-drug groups also came close to overturning a medical-marijuana defense on the books in Virginia. Supporters of medical marijuana view these setbacks as temporary, part of the inevitable backlash to 215. They recognize that while politicians still reflexively recoil from the charge of being “soft on drugs,” the voters are a different story. Which is why medical-marijuana proponents are focusing their efforts on ballot initiatives, in Oregon, Washington State, Colorado, Nebraska, Ohio, Florida and Maine. Nationally, their strategy to is create a checkerboard of “medical-marijuana states” that will eventually bring pressure on Congress to change its laws. So far public opinion appears to be on their side: in May, an ABC News poll found 69 percent of Americans support the legalization of medical marijuana.

Even so, the new crop of initiatives—most of which are modeled on California’s—will face stiff opposition, from General McCaffrey (who is seeking to spend millions on a public-service advertising campaign on marijuana) and from politically powerful grass-roots groups—groups that, it should be noted, are now eligible for Federal funds under the Drug-Free Communities Act signed last month by President Clinton. More than 80 percent of Americans oppose legalization of marijuana, and it is legalization, not marijuana’s medical uses, that the Clinton Administration wants to have frame the issue.

All concerned understand they are fighting a shadow war; the “slippery slope” is a metaphor that shapes the thinking on both sides, for opponents and proponents alike are joined in the conviction that the country’s acceptance of medical marijuana as something ordinary would in time undermine the very foundations of the drug war. So General McCaffrey may be on to something about medical marijuana when he suggests that it sends the “wrong” message; indeed, it contradicts a quarter-century of official messages about drugs. Medical marijuana sends the message that there are different kinds of drugs and different reasons for taking them, that drug use and abuse are not necessarily the same thing and that the Federal Government may not have the last word on the subject. It resumes a conversation about drugs as a public health issue that the modern drug war, with its cry of “zero tolerance,” tried to silence—a conversation in which the words of doctors and scientists count for as much as those of politicians and moralists.

The passage of Proposition 215 marks the end of “Just say no”—and the beginning of Americans saying a great many other things about drugs. It is a conversation that the war on drugs may not survive.

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, plumsize 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.

5.

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.”

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.” 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.

Sunday afternoon’s panel discussion had just adjourned, and gardeners were milling in small knots among the potted marijuana plants that dotted the room like ficus trees in a hotel lobby. Brian R., a grower in his 20′s who is originally from Washington and now lives in the Netherlands, was showing off a bud from his garden, pointing out its exceptional “calyx to leaf ratio.” With his oversize glasses, basement complexion and a taste for the kind of button-down short-sleeve shirt that usually keeps company with a plastic pocket protector, Brian looked more like a computer programmer than a gardener. But then, the most sophisticated marijuana gardening today takes place indoors, where technological prowess counts for as much as horticultural skill.

Brian noted proudly that his bud had been produced under a 600-watt sodium light in 60 days, a fact that clearly impressed a beefy older gardener from Florida. “Would you just look at that bud structure,” the fellow said, drawing me closer. The bud looked like a lump of hairy, desiccated animal scat. “See how tight it is? All those crystals? That’s one very pretty little bud.” The gardener from Florida passed it under his nostrils, appraising it like a cork. “I’d say this man clearly knows what he’s doing.” Brian smiled broadly and offered his new friend a taste. Now trading impressions gleaned from a joint the size of a small cigar, the two gardeners fell headlong into an arcane discussion of light levels and cellular cloning, proper curing technique and the relative merits of Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica. I think of myself as fairly knowledgeable gardener, but I was lost.

The occasion was the Cannabis Cup, a convention, harvest festival and industry trade show sponsored by High Times magazine and held each year over Thanksgiving weekend in Amsterdam, where the cultivation and possession of small amounts of marijuana, while technically illegal, are tolerated. On the first floor of the Pax Party House, a catering hall and meeting center in a residential section of the city, panels convened each afternoon to discuss the latest trends in marijuana horticulture and review developments in the hemp fiber industry. Upstairs in the exposition hall, hundreds of convention-goers strolled past booths displaying high-tech gardening equipment, marijuana seed catalogues and wholesale lines of hemp clothing, hemp foods and hemp cosmetics. Multiply the number of booths, pump in large quantities of marijuana smoke and the scene might have been the Jacob Javits Center, thronged with pushy exhibitors rehearsing their pitches, handing out samples, writing up orders. Things got very mellow in the evenings, however, when the delegates assembled in the main hall for comparison tastings of new hybrid strains, ultimately casting their votes for the world’s best marijuana. Seeds of the winning cultivars would be smuggled home with the gardeners, to be planted as part of next season’s crop.

I had come to Amsterdam to meet some of these gardeners and learn how, in little more than a decade, marijuana growing in America had evolved from a hobby of aging hippies into a burgeoning high-tech industry with earnings that are estimated at $32 billion a year. That makes it easily the nation’s biggest cash crop. Unlike corn ($14 billion) or soybeans ($11 billion), however, modern marijuana farming depends less on soil and sunlight than technology, allowing it to thrive not only in the fields of the farm belt but in downtown apartments and lofts, in suburban basements and attics, even in closets.

Fewer than 20 years ago, virtually all the marijuana consumed in America was imported. “Home grown” was a term of opprobrium—”something you only smoked in an emergency,” as one grower old enough to remember put it. Today, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the people assembled in this hall—as well as to the Federal war on drugs, which gave the domestic industry a leg up by protecting it from foreign imports and providing a spur to innovation—American marijuana cultivation has developed to the point where the potency, quality and consistency of the domestic product are considered as good as, if not better than, any in the world.

In an era of global competition, the rise of a made-in-America marijuana industry is one of the more striking—if perhaps least welcome—economic success stories of the 1980′s and 90′s. Domestic growers now dominate the high end of a market consisting of at least 12 million occasional users; on Wall Street, in Hollywood, on colleges campuses, consumers pay $300 to $500 an ounce for the re-engineered home-grown product, and even more for the “connoisseur”‘ varieties grown by the kind of small, sophisticated growers on hand for the Cannabis Cup. Peering through the haze at the conventioneers milling in the Pax Party House, Brian R. declared in a tone of deep reverence, “There are a lot of true pioneers in this room.”

Home Grown Grows Up

A bit of historical perspective, by way of a confession: Not only did your correspondent once inhale but, like a great many other gardeners (and nongardeners) of my generation, I also once grew. It was more than a decade ago, and in a very different time. Only a few years before, in 1977, President Carter had endorsed decriminalization of marijuana and even the Drug Enforcement Administration was entertaining the idea; 10 states, including New York, had already taken that step, though mine—Connecticut—was not one of them.

My own experience growing pot was a fiasco. In my backyard, I’d planted a couple of seedlings sprouted from some “Maui Zowie” given to me by my sister’s boyfriend. Within months, my avid weeds had ballooned to the size of small trees, rendering them uncomfortably conspicuous. The plants continued to grow at an alarming rate right into fall, though for some reason they refused to flower. This didn’t greatly trouble me, however, since in those days people still smoked marijuana leaves. (When I mentioned this quaint practice to Brian, he roared with laughter. Nowadays, only sinsemilla—the seedless bud of a female plant—is considered worth smoking; all the rest, called “shake,” is usually thrown out.)

My days as a marijuana farmer ended abruptly one October morning, when a fellow delivering a cord of firewood happened to let drop that he was the police chief of a neighboring town—this while standing in my driveway, a single well-aimed glance away from my 12-foot marijuana plants. I managed just barely to steer him off the property before he spotted them. Immediately thereafter, I harvested my first and last crop: a couple of pounds of leaves that I literally could not give away.

What had been a mildly humorous close call in 1980 (for all my paranoia, I risked little more than a fine and some embarrassment) would be distinctly unamusing in 1995. Today, the penalty for the cultivation of a kilo—2.2 pounds—or more of marijuana in the state of Connecticut is a five-year mandatory minimum sentence. Like most states, Connecticut rewrote its drug laws during the late 1980′s to impose heavy new penalties for marijuana crimes, but Connecticut’s are by no means the harshest: in Oklahoma, cultivating any amount of marijuana can result in a life sentence. And jail time is not the only penalty I would face were the police chief to find a couple of pot plants on my property today. Regardless of whether or not I was ultimately convicted of any crime, his department could seize my house and land and use the proceeds in any way it saw fit: a new cruiser, a pay raise, whatever.

This is America in the time of the drug war. A relatively little-known aspect of that war is that many Federal and state laws have been rewritten to erase the distinction between marijuana and hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, on the Reagan-era theory that the best approach to the drug problem is “zero tolerance.” Today, the Federal penalties for possession of a hundred marijuana plants and a hundred grams of heroin are identical: a mandatory 5- to 40-year sentence, without chance of parole. An American convicted of murder can expect to spend, on average, less than nine years behind bars.

Many Americans, perhaps recalling the legal and cultural climate of the 70′s, wrongly assume that marijuana has not been an important front in the drug war. Yet under the crime bill passed last summer, the cultivation of 60,000 marijuana plants is an offense punishable by death. Nowadays, marijuana is seldom grown on that scale; pot farming is by and large a cottage industry in which a thousand plants would be considered a big “grow.” Even so, there are more than 30 people in the country serving life sentences for the crime of growing marijuana.

With so much more at stake, the techniques of growing marijuana, as well as the genetics of the marijuana plant itself, have been revolutionized in the last 10 to 15 years—as one glance at the potted marijuana plants on display in the convention hall made plain. Apart from the familiar leaf pattern, these plants looked nothing like the plants I had grown. They looked more like marijuana bonsai—no larger than a patio tomato plant and yet fully mature, their stems bending under the weight of buds thick as fists.

While I was examining these specimens, wondering how the feat of miniaturization had been achieved, Brian drifted over to chat. He explained that plants such as these were in all likelihood clones of a modern hybrid strain that had been grown indoors in a completely artificial environment. By manipulating the amount, intensity and even the wavelength of the light the plant received, the carbon dioxide content of the air it breathed and the nutrients supplied to its roots, a skillful gardener can foreshorten the life cycle of a marijuana plant to the point where it will produce a heavy crop of flowers in less than two months on a plant no bigger than a table lamp.

Several dozen such plants can be grown in a square yard, Brian told me. His own current garden in Holland contained 100 plants in an area slightly more than six feet square—smaller than a pool table. This sort of densely planted indoor table-top garden is known among growers as the “Sea of Green” and it represents more or less the state of the art in marijuana horticulture. I asked Brian if I could pay a visit to his garden. He put me off—growing commercially is dangerous even here. But I could see he was tempted; most gardeners are showoffs at heart. “Let me talk to my roommate.”

To the Sea of Green

Without a doubt, one of the pioneers in Brian’s industry is Wernard, the proprietor of a leading marijuana garden center in Amsterdam. Now a professorial-looking fellow in his 40′s, Wernard was present at the creation of the Sea of Green, working with expatriate American growers (and their seeds) to perfect the indoor cultivation of marijuana. On Saturday afternoon, he offered a packed hall of gardeners—a surprisingly eclectic group that included, besides the expected array of aging and aspiring hippies, several middle-aged farmers, grad students and even a few sport-jacketed retirees—an informative slide lecture on its history and development.

What is perhaps most striking about the recent history of marijuana horticulture is that almost every one of the advances Wernard covered is a direct result of the opening of a new front in the United States drug war. Indeed, there probably would not be a significant domestic marijuana industry today if not for a large-scale program of unintentional Federal support.

Until the mid-70′s, most of the marijuana consumed in this country was imported from Mexico. In 1975, United States authorities began working with the Mexican Government to spray Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat, a widely publicized eradication program that ignited concerns about the safety of imported marijuana. At about the same time, the Coast Guard and the United States Border Patrol stepped up drug interdiction efforts along the nation’s southern rim. Many observers believe that this crackdown encouraged smugglers to turn their attention from cannabis to cocaine, which is both more lucrative and easier to conceal. Meanwhile, with foreign supplies contracting and the Mexican product under a cloud, a large market for domestically grown marijuana soon opened up and a new industry, based principally in California and Hawaii, quickly emerged to supply it.

At the beginning, American growers were familiar with only one kind of marijuana: Cannabis sativa, an equatorial strain that can’t withstand frost and won’t reliably flower north of the 30th parallel. Eager to expand the range of domestic production, growers began searching for a variety that might flourish and flower farther north, and by the second half of the decade, it had been found: Cannabis indica, a stout, frost-tolerant species that had been cultivated for centuries in Afghanistan by hashish producers.

Cannabis indica looks quite unlike the familiar marijuana plant: it rarely grows taller than 4 or 5 feet (as compared to 15 feet for some sativas) and its deep bluish green leaves are rounded, rather than pointed. But the great advantage of Cannabis indica was that it allowed growers in all 50 states to cultivate sinsemilla for the first time.

Initially, indicas were grown as purebreds. But enterprising growers soon discovered that by crossing the new variety with Cannabis sativa, it was possible to produce hybrids that combined the most desirable traits of both plants while playing down their worst. The smoother taste and what I often heard described as the “clear, bell-like high” of a sativa, for example, could be combined with the hardiness, small stature and higher potency of an indica. In a flurry of breeding work performed around 1980, most of it by amateurs working on the West Coast, the modern American marijuana plant—Cannabis sativa x indica—was born.

Beginning in 1982, the D.E.A. launched an ambitious campaign to eradicate American marijuana farms. Yet despite vigorous enforcement throughout the 1980′s, the share of the United States market that was home-grown actually doubled from 12 percent in 1984 to 25 percent in 1989, according to the D.E.A.’s own estimates. (The figure may be as high as 50 percent today.) At the same time, D.E.A. policies unintentionally encouraged growers to develop a more potent product. “Law enforcement makes large-scale production difficult,” explains Mark A. R. Kleiman, a drug policy analyst who worked in the Reagan Justice Department. “So growers had to figure out a way to make a living with a smaller but better-quality crop.” In time, the marijuana industry came to resemble a reverse image of the automobile industry: domestic growers captured the upscale segment of the market with their steadily improving boutique product while the street trade was left to cheap foreign imports.

The Reagan Administration’s war on drugs had another unintended effect on the marijuana industry: “The Government pushed growers indoors,” says Allen St. Pierre, assistant national director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “Before programs like CAMP”—the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, which targeted outdoor growers in California from 1982 to 1985—”you almost never heard about indoor grass.”

The move indoors sparked an intensive period of research and development, including selective breeding for potency, size and early harvest, and a raft of technological advances aimed at speeding photosynthesis by manipulating the growing environment. Gardeners also learned how to clone their best female plants, thereby removing the unpredictability inherent in growing from seed. All these developments coalesced around 1987 in the growing regimen known as the Sea of Green, in which dozens of tightly packed and genetically identical female plants are grown in tight quarters under carefully regulated artificial conditions. Near the end of his lecture, Wernard flashed slides of several such gardens he’d tended: green seas of happy-looking dwarf plants holding aloft enormous buds that elicited actual oohs and ahs from the gardeners in the audience.

As Wernard was quick to acknowledge, authorship for the Sea of Green belongs to no one horticulturist but rather to hundreds of gardeners working independently in the States and in the Netherlands and then sharing what they’d learned, often in the columns of High Times and Sinsemilla Tips, a defunct quarterly that many growers refer to as “the bible.” By 1989, their collective efforts had yielded exponential increases in the potency of American marijuana and earned the grudging respect of at least one D.E.A. agent, W. Michael Aldridge, who told a reporter on the eve of yet another crackdown (this time on indoor growers): “I hate to sound laudatory, but the work they’ve done on this plant is incredible.”

A Brilliant Career

Located in the red-light district directly across the street from a police station, the Greenhouse Effect is one of the 400 coffee shops in the Netherlands that serve marijuana. The place is little more than a dimly lighted corridor decorated in the Santa Fe style, with a cozy bar in the back. In addition to fruit drinks and snacks and an alarming-looking psychoactive pastry called “space cake,” its menu offers a dozen different kinds of marijuana and hashish, sold either by the gram or the joint. The Greenhouse Effect is one of a handful of Amsterdam coffee shops that carry Brian’s product, and one afternoon he agreed to meet me here to talk about his career.

Brian showed up for our appointment a half an hour late (few of the people interviewed for this article were ever on time), carrying the plastic shopping bag that serves as his briefcase. While we sat at a cafe table sipping soft drinks, a selection of his buds laid out between us in Tupperware containers, Brian retraced the path that had brought him to Amsterdam from an upper-middle-class childhood in a suburb of Washington.

The oldest son of two doctors, Brian was a member of his high school’s math and computer club when he began growing marijuana in 1986, though it was a friend in the drama club who got him started. The friend had been complaining about the price of marijuana, something Brian had never seen before, much less smoked. “I said: ‘Wait. This is a plant, right?’ He says: ‘Yeah, but it won’t grow here. I’ve tried.’ ” Brian was already a gardener—he raised tomatoes in his parents’ backyard—and growing marijuana seemed like an interesting challenge. “It was something to get me out of the computer club, put me on a slightly different level.” He tracked down a growing manual at an adult bookstore in D.C. and soon figured out that his friend had probably been trying to grow an equatorial sativa, when only an indica could be expected to flower in Maryland. “Now I was on a mission. I wanted to get the right seeds.”

His mission took him to a performance by the Grateful Dead, whose concerts served in the 1980′s as informal trading posts for the new indica hybrids being developed on the West Coast. Brian located the seeds he wanted, but he found the sight of so many Dead Heads strung out on drugs deeply unpleasant. “It left me with a bad taste about the whole experiment.” Disgusted at the scene, he made a point of changing the names of the seeds he bought (“hippie-dippy names like ‘Purple Flower Power’ “) to the more scientific system of letters and numbers he uses today: ST3, PB#3, B-Skunk x NL5.

Brian’s first crop of seedlings died after his little brother, worried the police would put his parents in jail, poured a bottle of Brut after-shave over them. Deciding he’d better move the operation out of his house, Brian recruited a couple of kids from his Hebrew school class (“I thought I could trust them a little more than the kids in my high school”) and together they planted a string of backyard gardens. In October, they harvested their first crop, manicuring the buds according to the instructions in the book and hanging them to dry in one of the partner’s attics. Many indicas exude a powerful, skunky smell and the parents quickly discovered the marijuana. “They told us to get it out of the house,” Brian said. “So we moved the grass out to the shed with the lawn mower, which was good enough for them. It was like saying you were kosher even though you had Chinese food in a refrigerator out in the garage.”

Since Brian still had no interest in smoking marijuana (“I was the farthest thing from drugs ever”), he sold his share of the harvest, clearing several thousand dollars. “More money than I’d ever seen in my life. I felt very elated and slightly guilty at the same time.” Elated because his product was so popular it soon made a local name for itself and guilty because he knew some of it was finding its ways into the hands of young kids. “This was heavy-duty pot and it caused some serious problems—at least one accident that I knew about. But I didn’t know how responsible I was, because at the time I still hadn’t smoked the stuff.”

As we talked, a modest parade of customers made its way to the bar to purchase marijuana, some for takeout, others to smoke in. Even now, years after becoming a smoker, Brian is careful not to romanticize the drug. “Smoking anything isn’t good for you,” he says, “and smoking marijuana makes you stupid.” Certainly the convention floor at the Cannabis Cup provided several cases in point, including one badly wasted fellow who introduced himself to me on five separate occasions, always with the same line: “I’m a smoker 32 years, living proof this weed doesn’t damage you.”

But Brian’s disdain for drugs yielded before his fascination with the intricacies of growing and then breeding marijuana, something he soon discovered he had a talent for. Investing $1,000 of the proceeds from their first crop in a mail-order hydroponic growing system, Brian and his partners set out 100 plants in an unused sauna in one of their homes. Brian soon noticed that one of the plants was very unusual: it had dark purple stamens and a smell that overpowered the garden. He kept scrupulous records on each plant (storing his notes on a Macintosh computer equipped with an encryption program) and noted that the purple-haired plant was also one of the earliest to flower and heaviest yielding. It also turned out to be the most potent.

Brian brought his “Potomac Indica” with him to college, where the response of his classmates convinced him that “what I had was very special.” Now working independently, he rented a house off campus and equipped it with a sophisticated growing system. Through a process of trial and error, Brian learned how to clone his Potomac Indica and more or less stumbled on the Sea of Green method for growing it. Through selective breeding, Brian developed several new strains, including one that he claims tested at 14 percent THC; THC, or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, is the principal psychoactive compound in marijuana. According to the D.E.A., the THC content of marijuana during the 70′s was between 0.5 and 2 percent; the average for indoor-grown sinsemilla today is between 8 and 10 percent. Brian’s new strain was as potent as anything on the market.

By his junior year, Brian had a thriving business but his grades were suffering. He was also now a smoker. “I said, ‘O.K., you can do well in school or you can do well with the growing.’ I made the wrong decision, I think.”

Brian dropped out of college in 1989 and turned professional. He opted for a highly decentralized operation, setting up a series of gardens in rented houses and apartments throughout the Washington area. Potomac Indica soon acquired a reputation. Brian reinvested his profits in the business, eventually building what amounted to a marijuana-growing franchise in towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard. In each region, Brian would select a local partner, set him up with equipment and clones, instruct him in the intricacies of the Sea of Green and then make regular on-site consultations in return for a percentage of the profits. Brian says he put 250,000 miles on a new car visiting grow rooms—exactly how many, he wouldn’t say—spread out over a 1,200-mile stretch of Interstate 95.

“I did well with the growing,” Brian offered, as he delicately minced a bud of his B-Skunk x ST4 with a pair of nail scissors and rolled a filtered joint. “The quality of my life has been one of extreme paranoia, however.”

Discriminating Tastes

On the third afternoon of the convention, growers gathered in the main hall for a panel discussion covering some of the finer points of the Sea of Green. Picture a university lecture hall in a dream by Cheech and Chong. Although the panelists—Wernard and two other growers—started out as somber and technical as botany professors, over the course of their presentations they rolled and lit up a succession of huge joints and these eventually took their toll. By the end of the session, a cloud of marijuana smoke had spread out over the room, forcing me at one point to slide down off my chair in search of a vein of cool, non psychoactive air. For audio-visual aids, there were slides and potted cannabis plants on stage that the lecturers occasionally referred to with a pointer. It was all a little surreal, never more so than when Wernard mentioned his company’s policy of requiring all employees to be marijuana smokers. It fell to an American in the back of the room to ask the inevitable question: “Do you make them take urine tests?”

The topic before the group was “Bio Versus Hydro.” According to Steven Hager, the editor of High Times, “a great schism” has opened between the increasing number of indoor gardeners who grow in soil, often organically, and those who stand by chemical-based hydroponic methods. Wernard made a strong case for the superior quality of bio-grown marijuana; he claimed that hydroponic marijuana had a harsher, more chemical taste. Arjan, the owner of a popular coffee shop, pointed out that hydro yields were far greater. Even so, he acknowledged that in a taste test he had conducted among his patrons, bio had enjoyed a slight edge: of 810 smokers, 83.14 percent expressed a preference for bio, compared to 81.4 percent for hydro. No one seemed to notice that the percentages added up to a lot more than 100; evidently the respondents felt very positively about both samples in the test.

I was surprised that, in the course of a two-hour panel discussion on marijuana growing, the subject of potency received relatively little attention. “People may not need much stronger grass at this point,” Brian later suggested. “So growers are concentrating on other qualities—taste, variety, esthetics.” Many of the conventioneers I talked to could discuss the distinctive qualities of various marijuanas with the passion and inventiveness of wine connoisseurs. Even the unsmoked buds were closely examined and intently sniffed—this one admired for its rust-colored stamens, that one for the “notes” of citrus or nutmeg in its bouquet.

During the convention, I met a burly Manhattan dealer and law student who was eloquent on the subject of marijuana taste. When I asked his impressions of a new variety that had won a Cannabis Cup award, he praised its pronounced “Afghani” taste. “Afghani is a big heavy smoky taste, really rich,” he elaborated. “But it has what I think of as a ‘pinpoint effect.’ Swirling around inside that big taste is something else—something sharper and thinner. The best way I can describe it is by analogy. You’re familiar with Ben & Jerry’s chocolate swirl? Well, it’s got this great big overpowering chocolate taste, but then within that taste, you get the counterpoint of those fine swirls of fudge. That’s the pinpoint effect.”

He described the mental effects of the winning variety with almost as much exactitude. It produced a “rapid, enveloping high,” he said, yet it had all the clarity of a fine sativa. Connoisseurs will often characterize a particular variety by situating it on a spectrum of marijuana highs ranging from the distinctly physical, narcotic effects of the archetypal indica to the comparatively stimulating, cerebral effects of a sativa. By manipulating the proportion of sativa genes to indica genes, breeders can design strains with precisely the effects they seek. Brian distinguishes between “blue collar” and “white collar” marijuanas. Customers who do physical work for a living “want to put their feet up at the end of the day and smoke a big, heavy indica,” he told me; an urban professional might prefer something more “uppy.”

Connoisseurship of this order tends to complicate one’s view of marijuana as a drug, especially when you think about the sort of bootleg product Prohibition is remembered for—just about anything with alcohol in it, some of it poisonous enough to blind or kill. Interestingly, most of the pot smokers I met expressed distaste for pills and white-powder drugs and disdain for their users. Marijuana connoisseurship suggests that, at least in this particular corner of the “drug culture,” the accent is as much on the culture as it is on the drug.

The Indoor Drug War

Few recent trends in the marijuana industry can be fully understood without reference to an event known among growers as “Black Thursday”: Oct. 26, 1989. That was the day the Bush Administration officially began Green Merchant, the first organized offensive in the drug war to take direct aim at indoor marijuana growers—and not only growers but also the legitimate companies that supplied their equipment and the publications that supplied much of their know-how. Along with a new Federal law that for the first time imposed mandatory sentences based on the number, rather than weight, of plants seized (5 years for 100 plants, 10 years for 1,000), Green Merchant radically altered the rules by which indoor growers operate. Six years later, the industry is still adapting to the new environment.

A D.E.A. agent named Jim Seward conceived Green Merchant in 1987 while thumbing through a copy of High Times. As he told a reporter in 1989, the magazine “just seemed to be a middleman in a dope deal.” By that time, the indoor marijuana industry was so large and well established, and so easy to enter thanks to the mail-order equipment stores and seed companies advertising in High Times and Sinsemilla Tips, that the Administration felt compelled to act. In the last week of October 1989, the D.E.A. raided hundreds of indoor growers and dozens of retail garden supply stores in 46 states, seizing equipment and customer lists. Virtually all the stores targeted by Green Merchant had advertised in High Times or Sinsemilla Tips, and the raids scared off enough advertisers to push Sinsemilla Tips out of business.

Using customer records seized from the grow stores, as well as 21,000 additional leads that the D.E.A. says it obtained from the United Parcel Service, law enforcement agencies undertook investigations of thousands of indoor growers, who soon discovered they weren’t as safe in their homes as they’d assumed. Now merely ordering garden supplies from the wrong company could bring drug agents to your door, as scores of African violet and orchid fanciers have been astonished to discover.

With the names and addresses of tens of thousands of suspects now in hand, law enforcement agencies developed a large appetite for indoor marijuana busts. “Marijuana growers are easy targets,” Allen St. Pierre of Norml says. As criminals, many of them are docile and amateurish, leaving behind a trail of U.P.S. records and credit card receipts as they set up their gardens; once established, a marijuana garden is much easier to find than any white-powder drug operation and arresting officers are far less likely to encounter resistance. Another powerful incentive is the asset forfeiture rules, which were liberalized during the drug war to allow agencies to keep the proceeds of whatever they seize. Since the crime of growing marijuana is by its very nature tied to a particular place—a house and a plot of land—seizing the assets of pot growers is particularly easy. All these factors help explain why, according to Norml, there were more arrests in 1994 for crimes involving marijuana than for all other illicit drugs combined.

I was curious to know how the D.E.A. explained its priorities, but the agency did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. However, in a recent internal report, entitled “California Cannabis Cultivation: Marijuana in the 90′s,” the agency defended Green Merchant, and its war on marijuana generally, as a necessary response to “a rapidly escalating problem.” The report claimed that marijuana was a “gateway drug” leading to the use of more serious drugs; that THC posed “potential health hazards,” which the increasing “quality and quantity” of domestic marijuana were making even worse, and that chemical runoffs from marijuana farms posed a threat to the environment. “There is good scientific reason,” the report concluded, for “grouping marijuana with other very serious and harmful drugs.”

Whatever the rationale, the war against marijuana is expensive—as much as $1.7 billion in criminal justice costs each year, by one estimate. And that fact, sooner than any shift in the ideological climate, is what could prove its undoing. In an era of shrinking government budgets, locking up nonviolent drug offenders becomes harder to rationalize. Last month, Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, looking to slash government spending, proposed relaxing the state’s mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, some of whom may even be released. If they aren’t already, marijuana growers should probably be voting Republican, since Republicans alone have the financial incentive, and the political cover, to reassess the costs and benefits of the drug war they started.

Like D.E.A. campaigns before it, Green Merchant failed to close down the marijuana industry, but it has altered the way it operates. One response to the post-Green Merchant environment was Brian’s: to decentralize operations, keeping each grow room as small as possible—ideally, fewer than 100 plants. As Brian reasoned, even if one garden were raided, others would continue to generate cash for a defense. In the wake of Green Merchant, growers also began paying attention to such mundane things as “effluents”—especially odors and heat—and kilowatt hours, since judges will now issue warrants to search houses emitting unusual amounts of heat or consuming large amounts of electricity.

By 1991, Brian felt he “was sitting on top of a very large time bomb.” Friends had also begun to tell him he was wasting his life. But what Brian most wanted was to be legitimate, not to give up growing and breeding marijuana. So he sold his gardens, told his parents about his secret life (“I was excommunicated”) and moved to Amsterdam. Here, he joined a community of emigre Americans that revolves around the culture of marijuana in much the same way earlier communities of emigres in Europe sprang up around avant-garde literature or painting while awaiting acceptance at home. At least that’s how some of them choose to see it. Marijuana growers are almost touching in their faith that America will soon come to its senses and legalize their trade. Prohibition, so quickly recognized as folly, is their great sustaining myth.

Into the Cybergarden

On my last day in Amsterdam, Brian took me on a tour of his expatriate world. The community’s epicenter—its La Coupole—is the C.I.A.: Cannabis in Amsterdam, a combination shop, gathering place and hemp store located in a large second-story loft a short walk from Central Station. The afternoon Brian and I dropped by was the last day of the Cannabis Cup and Americans were lining up to buy seeds to take home. (Tiny and odorless, marijuana seeds are not difficult to smuggle.) With their glossy, four-color photographs and extravagant promises, the catalogues they consulted might have been published by Burpee. I asked Adam Dunn, one of the two Americans who run the C.I.A., what had been his big sellers that week. Hindu Kush had sold out, he said, and AK 47 was moving briskly, even at $30 a seed. (The 47 refers to the number of days till harvest.) Everybody was also asking for a variety called Bubble Gum, which smells more like Bazooka than marijuana, making it one of the safest—that is, least detectable—indoor varieties to grow.

Next, Brian suggested we stop by Positronics, Wernard’s garden center, where Brian occasionally shops. Positronics is a sleek, sprawling showroom and factory, offering the indoor grower everything from specially blended and aged organic soil mixes to state-of-the-art carbon dioxide systems and a selection of clones—robust four-inch-tall marijuana plants sold in peat pots for $3 to $6 apiece.

Wernard escorted us through a warren of white-tiled rooms where employees working in a small assembly line cut, trimmed and rooted clones, producing several thousand each week. Watching the gardeners at work in their windowless cubicles, deftly transforming one plant into a dozen over and over again, I understood why the Netherlands had become such an important model for indoor marijuana growers. Horticulture in Holland has always been a matter of artifice, of forcing nature in every sense. Almost all of Holland’s farmland is man-made, reclaimed from the North Sea (the recent flood notwithstanding) by dint of effort and technology. Cursed with little sunlight and even less space, the Dutch have also had to master the art of indoor growing—of, essentially, combining large quantities of electricity and chemical fertilizer with the best plant genetics available to create gorgeous flowers, picture-perfect tomatoes and, now, some of the world’s most refined marijuana plants.

Sipping tea in Positronics’ gleaming showroom, Wernard and Brian fell to talking about the future of their industry. Both agreed that the Sea of Green was here to stay, though there was still room for improvement, particularly in the areas of safety (with more sophisticated effluent controls) and yield. Wernard claimed that yields of 800 grams per square meter, already attainable by top growers using carbon dioxide, will soon be routine and that advances in genetics could add another 150 grams to that—almost a kilo of sinsemilla every two months in a space no bigger than a phone booth.

Perhaps the most important advances in marijuana cultivation involve computerization, which promises to revolutionize growing and vastly complicate the work of law enforcement agencies. Over dinner, Brian limned his vision of the ultimate post-Green Merchant grow room: the cybergarden. Sensors will monitor the five important environmental factors (light, water, humidity, carbon dioxide levels and temperature) and feed the information to a personal computer. Using solenoid switches, a so-called “smart interface” and a bit of customized programming, the computer can track and automatically adjust all these variables, either according to a preset program or to instructions typed in by the gardener. Add a modem and a remote-access program, and the grower can tend his garden from anywhere in the world.

I was skeptical; it sounded a lot like the kind of rococo fantasies that pot smokers have always liked to spin—in this one, the 60′s drug culture joins forces with the 90′s hacker culture to outwit a common enemy. But Brian referred me to a recent series of articles on computer gardening in High Times and The Growing Edge, a magazine for legal high-tech growers (published by the former publisher of Sinsemilla Tips), that described similar setups. He also told me about a company in New Hampshire where, I later confirmed, one could purchase both the hardware and software needed to set up exactly the kind of cybergarden Brian had outlined.

Brian also talked about incorporating security features in his garden: a motion detector and a “Mayday” program that would dial his beeper number in the event of a security breach, bringing the news never to return. But wouldn’t the police be able to trace the gardener through information on the computer? Not if the data stream were sent through a remailer first, Brian explained. Remailers are anonymous mail drops that computer hackers have set up on the Internet, untraceable E-mail addresses where one can send or receive encrypted data. An article in the October High Times offered plans for a similar security system, adding one diabolical twist. By incorporating a computer virus like Viper or Deicide in the system, the computer could be programmed essentially to self-destruct as soon as it detected a security breach and alerted the gardener, rendering it worthless as evidence.

High Times describes cybergardening as “an exciting technology that has raced far ahead of ethics, law enforcement and government and corporate control.” Indeed. The technology will make it possible for a grower like Brian to tend his franchise gardens from the safety of a computer in Amsterdam; theoretically at least, he would need to visit the grow room only to plant and to harvest. In the future, the D.E.A. may find the gardens but not the gardeners.

A Garden Tour

On my last night in Amsterdam, Brian finally consented to let me visit his garden. Evidently the gardener’s reflexive exhibitionism had triumphed over the outlaw’s professional discretion. I remembered something Allen St. Pierre of Norml had told me: that the most common way for a grower to get caught is by boasting about his garden. He had shown me snapshots of prize plants that gardeners had mailed to Norml, sometimes in envelopes marked with return addresses.

The garden was in a working-class village half an hour north of Amsterdam. On the train, seated next to his plastic shopping bag, Brian explained that one of the reasons he chose to grow in this particular town is that it is home to a candy factory, a bakery and a chemical plant; together, they produce a cacophony of odors that overwhelms the smell emanating from his garden—important since the Dutch police sometimes raid marijuana gardens.

Brian also talked excitedly about his plans for the future, which include a legitimate seed company that will specialize in strains of medical marijuana geared toward specific ailments. “The same strain that helps glaucoma patients might not be the best one for polar disorders, and vice versa,” he said. The week before, Brian had told his parents of his business plans, and their reaction had been positive. “After five years, I’m finally getting recognition from my family,” he had told me earlier. Evidently, the two doctors and their son the marijuana grower had reconciled. “I’m going to be helping people.”

From the station, we walked through a tightly packed development of tiny cookie-cutter houses pressed up against the street. The Dutch shun curtains, and each gleaming picture window presented a diorama of Dutch life, illuminated by the glow of a television screen. We came to a modest, gambrel-roofed house and Brian showed me upstairs. At the end of a dark, narrow and hopelessly cluttered corridor, he opened a tightly sealed door. I was hit full in the face by a blast of searing white light and an overpowering stench: sweaty, vegetal, sulfurous, sickening.

After my eyes adjusted to the light, I stepped into a windowless room not much bigger than a walk-in closet, crammed with electrical equipment, snaked with cables and plastic tubing and completely sealed off from the outside world. More than half the room was taken up by Brian’s Sea of Green. The six-foot table was invisible beneath a jungle of dark, serrated leaves oscillating gently in an artificial breeze. There were a hundred clones, each scarcely a foot tall but already sending forth a thick finger of hairy calyxes. A network of plastic pipes supplied the plants with water, a tank of carbon dioxide sweetened their air, a ceramic heater warmed their roots at night and four 600-watt sodium lamps bathed them in a blaze of light for 12 hours of every day. During the other 12, they were sealed in perfect darkness. The briefest lapse of light, Brian noted gravely, could ruin the whole crop.

There was nothing of beauty here in this cramped chamber, and yet to a gardener there was much to admire. I don’t think I’ve ever seen plants that looked more pleased, this despite the fact they were being forced to grow under the most unnatural of circumstances—overbred, overfed, overstimulated, sped up and pygmied all at once. “More!” the marijuana plants seemed to say, sucking up the carbon dioxide, gorging on the fertilizer, throwing themselves at bulbs so hot and bright I finally had to look away. In return for a regimen of encouragement few plants have ever known, these 100 eager dwarfs would oblige their gardener with three pounds of sinsemilla before the month was out. Thousands of dollars worth of flowers.

It was all a little bit mad, and yet a gardener couldn’t help but be impressed, even as I counted the minutes before I could politely make my exit and draw an ordinary breath. Only later, on the train back to Amsterdam, did I fix on what may be the maddest part of all: that the credit for this most dubious of achievements belonged not only to the gifted, obsessed gardener and his willing plants but to the obsessions of a Government as well.