Beyond his scientific work , Carl Sagan is best fuck for his volume and documentary film that poetically explore the cosmos and humankind ’s place within it . It ’s less known that the cheeseparing - fabled stargazer and science communicator on the QT write an essay in 1969 depict his personal story of marijuana use .
The account appear in the 1971 book " Marihuana Reconsidered " by Dr Lester Grinspoon , a Harvard psychiatrist who became a lead proponent of legalizing marijuana . Sagan , however , write the essay under the anonym " Mr. X. ” It was only revealed that Sagan was the author after his demise when the life " Carl Sagan : A Life ” in public shed the beans ( many , however , suspected Mr X was Sagan all along ) .
Although he was only an occasional user of the drug , Sagan luxuriously describes how marijuana enriched his lifetime , both superficially and on a profoundly deeper level . After his first irrefutable experience getting high in his mid - mid-thirties , Sagan writes : “ Since then I have smoked on occasion and enjoy it exhaustively . It expand torpid sensibility and farm what to me are even more interesting effects . ”
Not only does Sagan describe how he enjoyed marijuana in a purely unpaid sense , but he also divvy up insights into how it serve to deepen his understanding of social issues and nontextual matter .
He compose : “ The cannabis experience has greatly meliorate my appreciation for art , a national which I had never much appreciated before . The reason of the spirit of the artist which I can attain when high-pitched sometimes carries over to when I ’m down . This is one of many human frontier that cannabis has help me traverse . There also have been some art - relate insights – I do n’t know whether they are true or assumed , but they were fun to formulate . ”
" For example , I have spent some sentence high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey . Some year later , I go forth from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef . In idly essay the arcuate pastel - colour coral fragments which made up the beach , I saw before me a huge Tanguey house painting . Perhaps Tanguey impose such a beach in his childhood . ”
The short accounting also features some keen anecdotes , such as Sagan taking a exhibitioner with his married woman while high and certainly becoming enlightened on the origins and stupidity of racialism .
Sagan wraps up the essay by tattle about the decriminalization of hemp , which he appear to imagine is inevitable , nonchalantly stating “ when cannabis is legalized . ” For him , marijuana lacks the physiological addiction seen with many illicit substances and isnotably less harmful . moreover , he reason marijuana has the potential to be a utilitarian tool for coping with the " increasingly sick and dangerous world " that we ’ve somehow found ourselves in .
“ The illegality of cannabis is usurious , " he concludes , " an check to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the placidity and brainstorm , sensitiveness and fellowship so urgently demand in this increasingly mad and grievous world . ”
you could show the full essayhere .
