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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.
They want their Carl Sagan news back.
Well, it's more valid than the status quo that imprisons millions of people for dumb-as-hell reasons derived from 1960s moral panics and 1920s racism.
Nobody thinks of the economic impact of freeing millions and millions of American citizens from indentured servitude.
How will the prison industrial complex get cheap labor if we legalize MJ, which is used to imprison non-whites and seize all their assets without warrants?
If the South has to give that up, it could be the end of the plantations!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A male dolphin.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
A frustrated romance of Sagan's played a small role in Lilly's most famous dolphin study. One night in St. Thomas, Sagan dined at a remote mountaintop restaurant. The hostess caught his eye. She was an attractive young woman with dark hair and a healthy, tomboyish quality. Her name was Margaret Howe. She told Sagan that she was bored. Her job as a hostess was evenings only. She wanted something else to occupy her on the island.
Sagan tried to get Howe into bed. Howe rebuffed him, but the meeting had one result: Sagan introduced Howe to anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who was then running the St. Thomas facility. This led to a job and plunged Howe into one of the most unusual experiments of the 1960s.
In the summer of 1965, Howe lived in the company of "Peter," a male dolphin, 24 hours a day, six days a week in a simplified flooded house. There are surreal photographs of Howe working efficiently at a desk or chatting on the telephone, eyed curiously by a dolphin as her whole environment is sopping in 24 inches of water.
"A dolphin is more like a shadow than a roommate," Howe said. The thing would stay by her all day and never leave. She could talk on the phone for hours. The dolphin wouldn't get bored. It wouldn't leave. As weeks passed, Howe was subject to depression and crying jags. "I have found that during the day I will find any excuse to get out of the flooded room," she wrote in her diary. (Lilly meanwhile was contemplating a flooded car for the future bi-species society.)
Peter began exhibiting courting behavior. He lightly nibbled Howe's legs, getting erections, and rubbing against her ardently. As a matter of expediency, Howe took to giving the dolphin hand jobs. Peter would "reach some sort of orgasm, mouth open, eyes closed, body shaking, then his penis would relax and withdraw." Dolphin libidos being what they are, this had to be repeated two or three times; then, finally, the dolphin could concentrate on its lessons.
That made for a pretty good conversation stopper. Otherwise the experiment's results were debatable. It seemed that Peter learned to say "hello" and "ball" and parrot consonant sounds. When Howe asked Peter to get the ball, he would often get the cloth.
* * *
After this experiment, Sagan visited St. Thomas and played a game of catch with Peter. Sagan threw the ball to Peter, and Peter dove under it and batted it back with his snout. His aim was as accurate as a human's. Then, after a few volleys, the dolphin began returning the ball far to the side of Sagan. Peter was toying with Carl, performing an "experiment" of his own. Figuring that two can play that game, Sagan retrieved the ball one last time and held it, treading water.
For about a minute, both mammals stood their ground. Peter gave in. He swam into Sagan's side of the tank, circling him, repeatedly brushing past him. This puzzled Sagan. It didn't seem like the dolphin's tail flukes had brushed him. Then he realized the dolphin had a hard-on.
The frustrated triangle of Sagan, Howe, and Peter was worthy of Sartre. There was a further twist. Peter was one of Lilly's ex-actor dolphins. Sagan had been propositioned by Flipper.
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.
You must be high.
Carl Sagan has 168 scientific publications, 10 of which have been cited more than 100 times. Many of them are in exceptionally high impact journals (e.g., Nature, Science).
LD50 of Tetrahydrocannabinol (active ingredient found in Cannabis): 3000 mg/kg in dogs and monkeys.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wi...
Same page says Oral LD50 of Table Salt: 3000 mg/kg in rats. So, marijuana is roughly on par with potato chips.
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