Prison Bans Magazine Over Story on Poppies

An article about opium poppies got Harper’s magazine banned from a federal prison in Florida.

The high-toned literary magazine’s April cover story, “Opium, Made Easy,” chronicles author Michael Pollan’s passage from innocent gardener to potential felon last summer as he learned how easily opium could be made from poppies growing in his yard.

Pollan’s piece explores the “high wall of misinformation and myth” surrounding opium poppies and argues that the government wants to control the supply of poppy information, not just poppies themselves.

“If opium is so easy to grow, and opium tea so easy to make, the best--perhaps the only--way for the government to stop people from growing and making their own is to convince them that it can’t be done,” Pollan writes.

The article also reprints a poppy-tea recipe from Jim Hogshire’s book “Opium for the Masses,” and that’s what caught the eye of officials at the Federal Prison Camp in Pensacola.

Warden Dennis W. Hasty withheld the Harper’s issue from an inmate subscriber, citing federal rules that let him reject a publication “if it is determined detrimental to the security, good order, or discipline of the institution or if it may facilitate criminal activity.”

Harper’s is appealing to the federal Bureau of Prisons, contending that the 1st Amendment prohibits prison authorities from censoring publications based on political content.

“This article is not even close to a how-to manual but rather is a very literary and humorous warning about the perils of poppy growing, with a pointed message about the war on drugs,” Harper’s said in its appeal.