Slashdot Mirror
Carl Sagan, as "Mr. X," Extolled Benefits of Marijuana
New submitter Colin Castro writes with an exceprt from the San Francisco Chronicle that reveals a different side of Carl Sagan: MarijuanaMajority.com founder Tom Angell spent a few days this summer in the Library of Congress researching the iconic American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist and author and has come away with a bounty. Angell says he found some never-before-released writings on marijuana policy from the author of classics such as 'Contact' and the TV show 'Cosmos', which is the most widely watched series in the history of American public television. ... 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,' Sagan wrote in 1971, under the name Mr. X.
I'm in a group that takes his philosophy of science...and marijauana...and spreads it via some pretty spaced out electronic music.
/shameless plug
We're called the Sagan Youth Boys. Check us out on Soundcloud for a taste. https://soundcloud.com/sagan-y...
Our 2nd album is coming out in a few months that'll be a hard sci-fi concept album based on a manned mission to Enceladus.
The fact that you call this "prattle" illustrates Sagan's point - because of his altered perception, he was able to grasp the magnitude of what he was working with. Smaller minds more easily dismiss it as foolish and inconsequential because their brains just can't handle the idea of "billions upon billions".
I mean this in the nicest possible way - go smoke some weed and stare up into the stars. It helps put things into perspective.
Good point. Another thing that muddies the stats is that many of the people who actually do time for MJ are people who had previously served time for some other offense, and the MJ offense winds them up in jail as a probation/parole/3 strikes violation, which depending on the jurisdiction may or may not get counted as "being imprisoned for marijuana".
For some numbers not pulled rectally, according to an ACLU analysis: "Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana." Remember that arrest means you were charged and it goes on your record. That alone should be enough misery to end this stupidity.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Allow me, please. :)
The industrialization of America after the turn of the century began to bring sizable numbers of US Southern blacks into the ghettos of our northern cities. They replaced the Italians, the last white group out of the ghetto, who themselves followed Irish and Jews, among many others. This is around 1920, and there's still plenty of racism, everywhere; even in New York City. But from the very beginning of New York City, there was a small contingent of black people. Not descendants of US slaves, but Caribbean immigrants, mostly.
These Caribbean immigrants were themselves descendants of slaves from sugar plantations and such, mostly run by the British, but also some French and Spanish. Slaves in the US were stripped of all their African culture; not a shred of original names or language or customs or anything survived. Not so much with the British, and especially the French and Spanish. They let them keep a lot of their culture; voodoo flourishes to this day in Haiti. Many were not even slaves per se; more like indentured servants or serfs. But even British slaves had it better than US slaves.
One of the things Caribbean blacks held onto, was the recreational use of marijuana. Marijuana has been known to the white man forever, and was not a big deal for about 1900 of the last 2000 years. It was commonly prescribed by doctors in the 1800s certainly, and before. But the white man, pretty much, never smoked marijuana as a common recreational thing. The white man's drug is beer. Well, and scotch. I don't know that they get complete credit for wine, but I think they get most of it. The white man loves his alcohol. He's been working on it for about 2000 years, at least.
Now, you need that liver enzyme to be able to enjoy your alcohol; some of us have it; really, most of us don't. Well, most of us didn't. And those of us white people that didn't, well, there's a good chance we died in the gutter as alcoholics and didn't have babies. Fast forward 2000 years, and most of us alive today can handle our liquor. Still not 100%, as we are all well aware. Asians and American Indians; severely lacking the alcohol friendly liver. If you haven't seen a full blooded Asian chick drink a whole glass of champagne, well; she's falling down drunk for an hour and a half. In the white man's world of super cheap beer and liquor, that lack of ability to casually drink alcohol plagues our Native American population to this day.
The black man in America is generally somewhere in between those two extremes. Beer was not completely unknown in ancient Africa, but was not a common thing in the deep jungles where slaves came from. But, he has been pressed into our white man's society for more or less, the last 400 years, so the law of liver selection has done it's work there, somewhat. Certainly, Caribbean blacks know what rum is for a long time now. And weed. Actually, there is a slightly Christian mysterious religion with roots in Africa, that uses pot as a meditation tool. Surely everyone knows who I am talking about.
So, back to our story of US Southern blacks migrating into our northern ghettos, at first filling out, and mixing with, the existing Caribbean immigrants, who have been filtering in for hundreds of years at that point. It's their turn; Black People; the Italians just did it, the Irish did it, hell, even the English WASPs did it when they carved it out of the woods, when bears and Indians and brigands could kill you at your front door. Pretty ghetto. The ghetto is the gateway to American society. Beginning in the 20s, the ghetto started becoming black, and the racists began to panic. One of the first things they did was to make pot illegal. White people didn't even know what it was, until Reefer Madness and all the hype; completely made up political BS. A tool, to keep the black man in the ghetto, and prevent him from integrating as he would otherwise.
And that racist BS persists to this day, although very few realize just how racist the anti-marijuana laws are
Frankly I think it's a matter of more people now have actually tried it, and the old hardheads are drying out. The Time magazine poll from 1969 put the *lifetime* use of cannabis among the US population at somewhere in the low single-digit percentage - I want to say around 2% but I'm sure you can look it up if you need the exact number. It definitely shocked me. This was already many years into the hippie movement, so weed was firmly embedding itself into the pop-culture mythology, but how many people who weren't hippies had used it? Very few - only the most open-minded.
Lifetime-use numbers did skyrocket through the following decades, reaching near to 50% by 2000. But politically it was/is still a very loaded issue. It's something that's easy to ignore and maintain the status quo, but political suicide to suggest to change, until it becomes such a *big* issue that the number people who know someone who's been fucked by prohibition gets to be bigger than the number of self-righteous assholes who won't listen. Gallup literally did a double-take in 2012 or 2013 when their polls showed, for the first time, that over 50% of the US favored legalization. They had to run the poll a second time. With stats like these rolling in, the political trepidation around this topic will begin to dissolve in short order. I think we've now reached the tipping point, just 40 years later than everyone thought. Presidents and governors now admit that they've smoked pot.
Revolutions happen from the bottom up, not the other way around.