The Notion of Illegal Plants

“McKenna said the notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place. He was describing a category error.”

'The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.'

McKenna said this as a philosophical observation, not a political campaign. The category error he is pointing at: a plant is not an action. A plant cannot be a crime.

What drug law actually makes illegal is not the plant but possession, cultivation, distribution, and use, a set of human actions. The legal structure attributes criminality to the plant itself as shorthand. When policymakers talk about 'Schedule I plants,' they are making a grammatical error as well as a pharmacological one.

The distinction matters because it determines what the policy is actually trying to accomplish. If the target is a specific plant, the policy is about eliminating the plant, which is both impossible and incoherent. If the target is specific human actions, the policy has a more defensible rationale, though still one requiring evidence about actual harm.

Psilocybin is produced by mushrooms that grow globally on every continent except Antarctica. The legal status of the mushroom does not change the chemistry of the spore. The spore is not illegal. The mushroom that grows from it is not illegal in many jurisdictions. The compound it contains is Schedule I.

The ridiculousness McKenna points to is real. The law has drawn a line around something that grew itself.

Sources

• McKenna, Food of the Gods (1992)