I’ve never grown sassafras, but I’ve known it all my life. I found it on a walk in the woods in my youth, and an adult pointed it out to me and it smelled just like root beer! Except without the chemicals and artificial sweeteners, it was pure and in the earth.

It’s a tree that once defined the medicine of this continent. A tree that made its way into tea pots, root beer barrels, and the hands of Indigenous healers across North America. It was everywhere. It was good. And then—like so many things that are old, natural, and rooted in a different kind of knowledge—it was banned.

The FDA outlawed safrole, a compound found in sassafras root bark, in 1960. Not because people were dying from drinking sassafras tea. But because, in lab rats, safrole caused cancer—after force-feeding it to them at doses no human would ever consume. Around the same time, the DEA later scheduled safrole as a “List I” chemical—because it could be used to make MDMA.

That’s when sassafras went from medicine to menace.

If you’re a tribal elder gathering sassafras for tea, you’re fine. If you’re boiling it for your family on the porch, no one will stop you. But if you dare to bottle it, label it, or God forbid sell it? Now you’re a criminal. Welcome to the rules of the game.

That’s how it goes.

The root didn’t change.

The people didn’t change.

The power did.

I’ve lived long enough to watch this pattern repeat itself, in tech, medicine, agriculture, and law. I’ve built things that worked. That helped. That healed. And the moment they were powerful enough to matter, the rules changed. Suddenly what was once acceptable—no, even encouraged—was now dangerous, noncompliant, illegal. Not because it harmed people. But because it slipped through the fingers of institutional control.

I’m tired of the double standard: that you can drink Coca-Cola but not sassafras tea. That you can eat hormone-pumped meat, drink pesticide-laced wine, and pop whatever FDA-approved pill they’re pushing this quarter—but you can’t sell the root that made the first American exports to Europe.

Even Native Americans—whose ancestors defined the medicinal use of sassafras—can’t sell it legally if it contains safrole. They can use it, but only in private. Not in commerce. Not in trade. Not in a way that threatens centralized systems of power.

And that’s the point. It’s not about safety. It’s about permission.

So here we are, again—talking about sassafras. But we’re not really talking about sassafras, are we?

We’re talking about sovereignty.

We’re talking about what happens when something grows without asking.

And what’s done to those who try to share it.