My Grandmother, the Drug Lord
“Crop: 1997-98″ by Roxy Paine. [source]
When I was young, my grandmother on my father’s side lived in Seymour, Texas, where she maintained a garden that occupied her entire backyard and produced everything from apricots to okra to poppies. From the poppies, she harvested seed, which she used to make huge batches of Czech kolaches from a family recipe which has been lost to my generation, as she cooked by touch and had much smaller hands than those of us American-born city dwellers in her bloodline. Like most folks my age who grew up here in the U.S., I was exposed to more than a little of Nancy Reagan’s bizarre, inarticulate “Just say no!” campaign — a campaign which resulted in such farcical situations as me playing, at age 7, a drug dealer in a musical about saying no to drugs. And, so, one day in my grandmother’s garden, I asked my mother if those vivacious red flowers sprouting in grandmother’s garden were, you know, illegal. Although my mother assured me they were not the kind of poppies one goes making drugs out of, in retrospect it seems quite possible they were.
Someone I follow on Twitter recently posted this old Michael Pollan piece about gardening, poppies, and the war on drugs, and I have to suspect. (Note: This piece is old enough that Pollan is nowhere near as smug as I normally think of him being, and I’m therefore comfortable recommending it.) The flowers in my grandmother’s yard most likely came from some envelope or other somewhere labeled “breadseed poppies,” and as Pollan discovered, breadseed poppies are the same flowers that produce opium and its derivatives. The DEA never kicked my grandmother’s door down, so the answer remains uncertain, but like I said, I have my suspicions.
When I lived in Houston, I saw an exhibit by the artist Roxy Paine, which included a piece like the piece above — a brilliant field of poppies meticulously replicated in synthetic materials. I’ve heard the piece interpreted as commentary on addiction, or of how something sinister lurks inside a beautiful plant. Maybe that’s true. But, to me, it and some of the other pieces in the series pose an explicit question of the wisdom of trying to regulate so many things that grown of their own accord. As the tension has ratcheted up in the war on drugs, the laws have become increasingly specific and easy to violate. The knowledgeable growing of opium poppies, it seems, is viewed as not too far removed from the knowledgeable set up of a meth lab. If the DEA comes kicking down your door, and finds a bumper crop of hallucinogenic mushrooms out behind the garden shed, how do you persuade the powers that be that you didn’t know what they were, or that they were there? Who, exactly, would believe you?
And, as to that second-grade play, it is titled Pinocchio, Don’t Smoke That Cigarette and appears to still be in circulation. It features not only a whole bevy of songs that, in true 1980s fashion, equate all drugs from alcohol to heroin, but a song about how awful candy is called “Empty Calories.” There is, apparently, no sense of moderation or even basic pleasure in the world of the titular character, Pinocchio Jones — whether you’re shooting smack or sucking on a hard candy, you’re pretty much screwed.