‘Sorry I’m late … or early … or on time’
Mid-1750s rococo at Powderham Castle, Devon. From Old Homes, New Life: The Resurgence of the British Country House by Clive Aslet, Triglyph Books, £50
drinks are caffeinated, and not for taste, but for buzz and addiction. Some 90 per cent of humans ingest caffeine regularly. You’re almost certainly an addict. When you drink your cup of coffee in the morning, the good feeling comes from mitigation of the withdrawal symptoms that have crept in overnight. Caffeine is thought to have evolved in plants for two main reasons. It reduces the destructiveness of some insects by sending them haywire and making them vulnerable to predators; and it attracts some pollinators (perhaps making them addicted) and increases their memory of the caffeine-producing flower’s scent. But at a cost: caffeinated bees don’t forage as efficiently. They store less honey. Caffeine makes us ‘faster but not smarter’. It boosts a particular kind of productivity – the kind associated with
to-do lists and intense focus on an individual point. The kind associated with the destructive, nerdish, tyrannous left hemisphere. The kind that makes you lose sight of context. It has certainly caused a breach with our own biology and with the non-human world. It rides roughshod over our circadian rhythms and the natural pace of things. Surely it is more than a coincidence, Pollan observes, that caffeine and the minute hand on clocks arrived at more or less the same historical moment. Most interesting of all is mescaline, the product of various cacti, including peyote and the San Pedro cactus. It was mescaline that made the folds of Aldous Huxley’s trousers fascinating. It seemed to Huxley, as to Pollan, that mescaline disabled the valve that normally The Oldie July 2021 55
DYLAN THOMAS
elaborate symbiosis. Say hello to your friend and you’re talking to an ecosystem. That’s worth knowing. Pollan’s brilliant, compulsively readable book is an attempt to acknowledge and explicate this symbiosis. He examines, consumes and abstains from three plant substances – opium, caffeine and mescaline – telling us what it’s like to be on and off them. These three drugs, he contends, ‘hold up mirrors to our deepest human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world’. He’s right. To describe that entanglement involves much more than a diary of tripping and cold turkey. It demands a cultural, economic and political history of our liaison with the plants. Pollan’s story telling is deft, forthright and fascinating. We learn that opium preparations were as common in the Victorian medicine chest as aspirin is in ours; that poppy tea is served at Middle Eastern funerals to take away the sadness; that Nixon’s drug war was – explicitly and cynically – a proxy war on the anti-war hippies (represented by marijuana) and black Americans (represented by heroin). ‘Did we know we were lying about the drugs?’ asked John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic adviser. ‘Of course we did.’ It makes you wonder what our current – highly selective – wars on ‘drugs’ are really about. This potpourri of historical facts would itself make the book worthwhile. But it is mainly – and most absorbingly – concerned with the effect of these substances on individual human heads and identities. Opium is the least interesting. Pollan’s home-brewed poppy tea ‘didn’t seem to add anything new to consciousness’, as many other drugs do. It merely subtracted melancholy, worry and grief. Caffeine is an issue for most of us. That includes our children: most soft
