Carl Sagan's essay on marijuana

420420420 · Mar 26, 2008

If you don't know who Carl Sagan is, hes one of the most influential astronomers of the 20th century and known for having possibly the largest influence in popularizing science. I just started reading Cosmos, which is essentially a layman's guide for the introduction of astronomy, cosmology, and the way its evolved through the ages.

Anyways, it was announced after his death that he was a cannabis user, and he detailed his experiences under the pen name Mr X. Heres one of his essays:

[SIZE=-1]This account was written in 1969 for publication in Marihuana Reconsidered (1971). Sagan was in his \tmid-thirties at that time. He continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life - a time when I had \tcome to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and \tamiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally \tsmoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent \teuphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually \tpersuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to \tentertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation \trather than by chemistry.
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[SIZE=-1]After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my \tback in a friend's living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not \tcannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly \toutlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between \tVolkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even \tthe small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie \tgoing on the inside of my eyelids. Flash . . . a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, \tyellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash . . . same scene, orange house, brown sky, red \tclouds, yellow path, violet fields . . . Flash . . . Flash . . . Flash. The flashes came about once a heartbeat. \tEach flash brought the same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of colors . . . exquisitely \tdeep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in their juxtaposition. Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed it \tthoroughly. It amplifies torpid sensibilities and produces what to me are even more interesting effects, as I will \texplain shortly.
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[SIZE=-1]I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in \tthe heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who \tappears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one \tof those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful \texperience.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]I want to explain that at no time did I think these things 'really' were out there. I knew there was no \tVolkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don't feel any contradiction in \tthese experiences. There's a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; \tthere's another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part \tappreciating the work of the creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides \tof my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that \taccompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it's my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any \ttime I want to.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]While my early perceptions were all visual, and curiously lacking in images of human beings, both of these items \thave changed over the intervening years. I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high. I test whether \tI'm high by closing my eyes and looking for the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations in my \tvisual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise problem, the visual noise level being very low \twith my eyes closed. Another interesting information-theoretical aspects is the prevalence - at least in my flashed \timages - of cartoons: just the outlines of figures, caricatures, not photographs. I think this is simply a matter of \tinformation compression; it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the information content \tof an ordinary photograph, say 10[SIZE=-2]<sup>8</sup>[/SIZE] bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies. And the flash \texperience is designed, if I may use that word, for instant appreciation. The artist and viewer are one. This is not \tto say that the images are not marvelously detailed and complex. I recently had an image in which two people were \ttalking, and the words they were saying would form and disappear in yellow above their heads, at about a sentence \tper heartbeat. In this way it was possible to follow the conversation. At the same time an occasional word would \tappear in red letters among the yellows above their heads, perfectly in context with the conversation; but if one \tremembered these red words, they would enunciate a quite different set of statements, penetratingly critical of the \tconversation. The entire image set which I've outlined here, with I would say at least 100 yellow words and \tsomething like 10 red words, occurred in something under a minute.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much \tappreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries \tover to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have \tbeen some art-related insights - I don't know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For \texample, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I \temerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral \treef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast \tTanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been \table to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since \tdiscovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their \theads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent \tcarried over when I'm down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we \tordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a \ttexture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of \tsex - on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by \tdistracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen \tgreatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.
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[SIZE=-1]I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. \tThe heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and \tinanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the \thypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, \ta playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most \trewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that \twe spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is \treally like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use \tthat word 'crazy' to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political \tdissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs \there: 'did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.' When high on cannabis I discovered that \tthere's somebody inside in those people we call mad.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, \tsmells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only \thalf understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me \twhich I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, \tboth visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in \tthe morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real \tinsights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are \twhen we're down the next day. Some of the hardest work I've ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or \tin writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording \tone. It is easy to understand why someone might think it's a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the \tthought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I've made the \teffort - successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, \tbut only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to \tsomeone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must \tmake an effort to remember, I never do.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very \tdifferent from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while \thigh, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It \twas a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to \twrite the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had \twritten eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. \tBecause of problems of space, I can't go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as \tpublic reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university \tcommencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]But let me try to at least give the flavor of such an insight and its accompaniments. One night, high on \tcannabis, I was delving into my childhood, a little self-analysis, and making what seemed to me to be very good \tprogress. I then paused and thought how extraordinary it was that Sigmund Freud, with no assistance from drugs, had \tbeen able to achieve his own remarkable self-analysis. But then it hit me like a thunderclap that this was wrong, \tthat Freud had spent the decade before his self-analysis as an experimenter with and a proselytizer for cocaine; and \tit seemed to me very apparent that the genuine psychological insights that Freud brought to the world were at least \tin part derived from his drug experience. I have no idea whether this is in fact true, or whether the historians of \tFreud would agree with this interpretation, or even if such an idea has been published in the past, but it is an \tinteresting hypothesis and one which passes first scrutiny in the world of the downs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and \tperceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written \tdown casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in \tthe morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely \tsense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, \tI may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort \tmyself to take such remarks seriously. I say 'Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!' I \ttry to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of \tin thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass \tcritical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available \twith cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational \tsystem, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual \tpursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, \tand choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's \tminds.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp \tthe joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? While I find a \tcurious disinclination to think of my professional concerns when high - the attractive intellectual adventures \talways seem to be in every other area - I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult \tcurrent problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a \trange of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent. So far, so good. At least the recall \tworks. Then in trying to conceive of a way of reconciling the disparate facts, I was able to come up with a very \tbizarre possibility, one that I'm sure I would never have thought of down. I've written a paper which mentions this \tidea in passing. I think it's very unlikely to be true, but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, \twhich is the hallmark of an acceptable theory.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate \tobserver, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in \theavy traffic when high. I've negotiated it with no difficult at all, though I did have some thoughts about the \tmarvelous cherry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the drive I'm not high at all. There are no flashes \ton the insides of my eyelids. If you're high and your child is calling, you can respond about as capably as you \tusually do. I don't advocate driving when high on cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experience that it \tcertainly can be done. My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most \talcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly smaller amounts of cannabis \tsuffice to produce the same degree of high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by \tinhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I've never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn't too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.[/SIZE]
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OODA · Dec 12, 2010

this is so dope!

bluedream420x · Dec 13, 2010

Carl Sagan is one of my most looked up to astrologists of all time. This is why he is one of my favorites.

no comment · Dec 13, 2010

bump, this rules. read it.

dirtyroot · Dec 15, 2010

bluedream420x said:

Carl Sagan is one of my most looked up to astrologists of all time. This is why he is one of my favorites.
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He's one of your most looked up to astrologists? That's odd, as he was actually anti-astrology.
He was an astronomer.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iunr4B4wfDA]YouTube - Carl Sagan on Astrology[/ame]

morrowb · Dec 15, 2010

If you respect marijuana history you'll read this paper.

kamselvi · Dec 15, 2010

so true. i've been thinking about a lot of what he describes in this essay. the sex part is especially true haha

jb5355 · Dec 18, 2010

awesome read.

Sunshine86 · Dec 18, 2010

I've read this several times before but it never gets old. Dr. Sagan is one of my favorite people of all time.

Shaggy2High · Dec 18, 2010

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI9ImScQGAo]YouTube - Carl Sagan-Cosmos edited for rednecks[/ame]

PuffPuffHOLD · Dec 18, 2010

beautiful.

Shaggy2High · Dec 18, 2010

I just read it and it was excellent.

ZedLeppelin · Dec 19, 2010

That was awesome.

Cottonmouth 85 · Dec 19, 2010

420420420 said:

I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. 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!' I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds.
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I'm sorry but that is hilarious. Did nobody notice this? He must've been high as a kite. I can just picture him alone in his room yelling political conspiracies into a tape recorder. "This is real motherfucker! Nixon is a coward I'm telling you! I'm not stoned! Cody Fischer. See! That was my best friend in kindergarten. There is no way I could remember that if I was stoned!"

Then him listening to that tape in the morning and going "Wtf?"

Not to mention his general experiences of being stoned. Jesus. Those 60's sativas must've been something special.

SkinnyFists · Dec 19, 2010

A very good read. thanks for posting

gismo · Dec 19, 2010

Cottonmouth 85 said:

I'm sorry but that is hilarious. Did nobody notice this? He must've been high as a kite. I can just picture him alone in his room yelling political conspiracies into a tape recorder. "This is real motherfucker! Nixon is a coward I'm telling you! I'm not stoned! Cody Fischer. See! That was my best friend in kindergarten. There is no way I could remember that if I was stoned!"

Then him listening to that tape in the morning and going "Wtf?"

Not to mention his general experiences of being stoned. Jesus. Those 60's sativas must've been something special.
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yeah i thought that too haha. still a good read though.

Flawed Legacy · Apr 14, 2011

"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."

Haha that's all he could think about during a time like that. He was a boss.

sega · May 27, 2011

i like weed...
and i like astronomy...
i don't know when he wrote this but now i feel like damn he's gone...

i wish i have met him personally.

r.i.p. carl sagan.

R Complex · May 28, 2011

Ill just leave this here

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g]YouTube - ‪Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot‬‏[/ame]

R.I.P Carl Sagan, your voice is sorely missed.

aldkgh · Nov 27, 2011

I love this guy so much

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Carl Sagan's essay on marijuana

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no comment do the right thing

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morrowb Holden Caulfield

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Sunshine86 Equality 7-2521

Shaggy2High Groovy!!

PuffPuffHOLD ~A mind healing with time

Shaggy2High Groovy!!

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