He is not a brave man who spits on the sidewalk simply because it is
illegal. Michael Pollan's "Opium, Made Easy" is worse than empty and
selfindulgent it is an insult to dissent. "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." Please. Pollan isn't in for a
nickel. It is plain to any reader of this overblown psychodrama that at no
point did Pollan place at risk even the smallest portion of his comfortable
station.

I, too, am a felon. I have purchased marijuana on the streets of New York
and smoked it publicly. I have consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms and
morningglory seeds (which will make you violently ill before they make you
trip). Admissions of this nature in national publications are both routine
and safe. It is a path well charted through the pages of High Times and the
New York Times. The DEA, the FBI, and the police will not care any more
than I do about Pollans sojourn into the country of criminality. They have
less pretentious fish to fry.

The only story here belongs to Jim Hogshire, whom Pollan refused to invite
into his home lest he further incriminate himself and whose experience
Pollan mines exclusively for its apparent justification of his own
paranoia. Pollan's readers are not interested in his personal cowardice;
they are interested in opium, his purported subject. That we receive no
indication of whether Pollan brewed his tea, drank it, and experienced a
blessed cessation of idle worry sucks the promised centerpiece straight out
of the piece.

In the closing paragraphs of the article, as it becomes abundantly clear
that Pollan will refuse to reward his reader's patience with a description
of any actual experience, he slyly attempts to shift his soft focus from
himself to the capriciousness of narcotics law. He casts his own article as
a demand for civil rights. But civil disobedience requires . .
disobedience. Pollan has decried what he perceives to be an abridgment of
his civil liberties with selfcensorship. How bold! the law has little to fear form
his pen.

Simon M. Greenwold
Brooklyn, N.Y.