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- California Cosmology: Carl Sagan's Berkeley years.
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- For young people of the '60s and '70s, marijuana use
was a rite of passage. To the very youngest, smoking the illegal drug was
the boldest way to rebel against parental and governmental authority. But
many young adults used "weed" too. The term "groves of academe"
took on a new meaning in universities, where the spiky-leaved plants grew
vigorously and covertly under ultraviolet lamps in dormitory closets.
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- Carl Sagan had been a regular marijuana user from the
early '60s on. He believed the drug enhanced his creativity and insights.
His closest friend of three decades, Harvard psychiatry professor Dr. Lester
Grinspoon, a leading advocate of the decriminalization of marijuana, recalls
an incident in the '80s when one of his California admirers mailed him,
unsolicited, some unusually high-quality pot. Grinspoon shared the joints
with Sagan and his last wife, Ann Druyan. Afterward Sagan said, "Lester,
I know you've only got one left, but could I have it? I've got serious
work to do tomorrow and I could really use it."
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- Grinspoon's 1971 book "Marihuana Reconsidered"
included a long essay by an unidentified "Mr. X," who described
his happy experiences with the drug. The essay identified Mr. X as "a
professor at one of the top-ranking American universities" but disguised
his identity by saying he was "in his early forties." In my interview
with Grinspoon, he revealed that Mr. X was Sagan (who turned 37 the year
the book was published by Harvard University Press).To Grinspoon, Sagan's
use of the drug is dramatic disproof of the popular wisdom that pot diminishes
motivation: "He was certainly highly motivated to work, to contribute."
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- Mr. X's essay is of interest not merely because it reveals
Sagan's use of an illegal drug but also because it offers a glimpse of
feelings he rarely shared. Portions of the account follow, beginning with
Sagan's drug-induced version of Plato's myth of the cave.
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- It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably
more relaxed period in my life " a time when I had come to feel that
there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social
consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences.
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- I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally
smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was
unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced
and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually
persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing;
there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses
about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation
rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts,
however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend's living room
idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant
(not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately
detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was
very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between
Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down
to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening
the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was
a movie going on on the inside of my eyelids. Flash...a simple country
scene with red farmhouse, blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering
over green hills to the horizon. Flash...same scene, orange house, brown
sky, red clouds, yellow path, violet fields... Flash...Flash...Flash.
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- The flashes came about once a heartbeat. Each flash brought
the same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of
colors...exquisitely deep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in their juxtaposition.
Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed it thoroughly...
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- I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures
on the insides of my eyelids," Mr. X/Sagan wrote.
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- Even so, he remained the astute scientific observer:
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- While my early perceptions were all visual, and curiously
lacking in images of human beings, both of these items have changed over
the intervening years.... I test whether I'm high by closing my eyes and
looking for the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations
in my visual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise
problem, the visual noise level being very low with my eyes closed....
[Flashed images resemble] cartoons: just the outlines of figures, caricatures,
not photographs. I think this is simply a matter of information compression:
it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the
information content of an ordinary photograph, say 108 [100 million] bits,
in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies.
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- "I find that today a single joint is enough to get
me high.... in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just
by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater." Pot enhanced
his pleasure in music and food. ("A potato will have a texture, body,
and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so.") In sex,
too: marijuana "gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand
it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of images
passing before my eyes."
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- "I find that most of the insights I achieve when
high are into social issues," he added. "I can remember one occasion,
taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the
origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves.
It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves
in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led
to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found
I had written 11 short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical,
and human biological topics...I have used them in university commencement
addresses, public lectures, and in my books....
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- "...If I find in the morning a message from myself
the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we
barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that
certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve;
but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in
which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say "Listen
closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!"
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- Sagan added: "I have on a few occasions been forced
to drive in heavy traffic when high. I've negotiated it with no difficulty
at all, although I did have some thoughts about the marvelous cherry-red
color of traffic lights."
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