REEFER MADNESS

CORNWALL - During the course of researching his latest book, "The Botany of
Desire," Michael Pollan spent a delightful evening smoking pot in an
Amsterdam cafe and made an important discovery about himself and America's
$20 billion war on drugs: Marijuana didn't make him feel "stupid or
paranoid" anymore.

MICHAEL POLLAN of Cornwall wrote "The Botany of Desire," a study of how
man's desire to alter nature has affected apples, tulips, potatoes and
marijuana.

The improvements in America's favorite controlled substance - a vast change
from Pollan's hippie days at Bennington College in Vermont in the early
1970s - have come about, he concludes, for an important reason.

"Operating in the shadow of a ferocious drug war," global pot growers have
literally been forced underground into modern, scientifically managed
marijuana cellars, where cross-breeding and improved growing methods have
turned pot into a more potent, benign high while removing the noxious side
effects of old.

The result? Cannabis has been transformed into "what is today the most
prized and expensive flower in the world."

"The drug war is great politics," Pollan said during an interview at his
mountaintop home here, an elaborate, 7-acre warren of gardens, ponds and
elegant stone walls reclaimed from the site of a former dairy. "Declaring a
war on drugs explains away a lot of crime and why we have problems with our
kids. But like all societies, we're torn both by a desire to alter
consciousness and then to control the consequences of that, and it's really
the ambiguities of that behavior that drew me toward understanding the
culture of growing marijuana."

The disappointing results of America's drug war are but one of many ironies
in "The Botany of Desire," a whimsical, literary romp through man's
perpetually frustrating and always unpredictable relationship with nature.

Pollan didn't set out to become a New Age critic of America's drug laws,
and he seems an unlikely candidate for that kind of attention. In 1994,
Pollan abandoned a successful career as an editor in New York to devote
himself full time to writing. As the founding editor of the Harper's
Magazine "Index" and later the magazine's executive editor, he was regarded
as an up-and-coming star capable of taking over any number of high-profile
editorial posts. But Pollan found himself increasingly drawn to the
pleasures of gardening and writing about his experiences in nature.

"I found that nothing was more pleasurable than devoting a long evening to
gardening after a day spent writing or guest-editing in New York," says
Pollan, who had floodlights installed so he could garden after dark.

Pollan, 46, is often surprised by the impact of his quirky, discursive
essays. In 1998, a long article Pollan published in The New York Times
Sunday Magazine, "Playing God in the Garden," described how Monsanto had
introduced a genetically engineered potato to kill off the Colorado beetle,
largely without public notice. The article's appearance led to a wholesale
review of genetically engineered potatos by the U.S. Department of
Agriculture. This spring, Monsanto quietly dropped the product.

Pollan's two earlier books - "Second Nature," a critically acclaimed
meditation on gardening, and "A Place of My Own," his lyrical account of
spending a year designing and building a writer's cabin behind his home -
established him as a sort of Emerson of the contemporary gardening and
shelter boom.

In his new book, Pollan chose four common, commercially successful plants -
the apple, the tulip, the potato and marijuana - to explore the connection
between man's desire to alter nature and how the plant world responds. But
Pollan's probing and at times hilarious journey through America's marijuana
culture will provoke the most notice as he makes the rounds of television
shows and a six-city book tour.

"The big lesson I took away from `Second Nature' was that the garden is the
place where we look to to answer our questions about nature," Pollan says.
"But in the end, I was interested in us, people. By looking at plants that
have evolved to gratify the desires, maybe I could understand the nature of
those desires themselves."

Few Americans, as well, realize the threat to basic freedoms raised by the
war on drugs. "You can go down through the Bill of Rights - all 10 of them
- - and easily determine that freedoms have been eroded by decisions on drug
cases, and most of these are pot cases," Pollan says. "The Sixth Amendment
right to confront your accuser, the Fourth Amendment right to unreasonable
searches have all been curtailed as a result of drug cases."

Pollan, however, refuses to become a moral sourpuss about what he considers
to be America's overzealous war on pot, and his journey through the
marijuana culture reveals several fascinating nuggets of trivia and
hilarious personal events. Pollan discovers, for example, that astronomer
Karl Sagan avidly experimented with pot and even anonymously published an
essay on the subject. Pollan's own brief career as a marijuana farmer
almost ended in disaster when he accepted delivery of a cord of firewood
from a man who turned out to be the chief of police from New Milford.

Pollan's odyssey through the world of marijuana reveals one final, perhaps
critical, irony. The rapid spread of pot in the 1960s "and the attendant
official worries" freed up generous government resources to study how
marijuana affects the brain, and Israeli and American researchers soon
discovered both the "psychoactive" agent and the receptor in the brain that
creates a pot high. The resulting research has revolutionized science's
understanding of how the brain works.

"People always thought that if they took mind-altering drugs, maybe they'd
understand consciousness more," Pollan says. "Now we're realizing that
studying pot and its effects are changing what we know about the brain,
everything from memory, emotion, appetite and so forth. Scientifically, pot
has literally unlocked the secrets of the brain."