cannabisnews.com: No Wonder He Was a Space Cadet





No Wonder He Was a Space Cadet
Posted by FoM on September 22, 1999 at 14:10:39 PT
Paul Greenberg, Syndicated Columnist
Source: Pioneer Planet
Somehow it did not come as a surprise to learn that Carl Sagan, the great popularizer of almost everything, was using marijuana when he was composing some of his bill-yuns and bill-yuns of theories.
Straight out of the bell-bottomed '70s, Sagan's starlight lounge was a sight to behold. It was a kind of verbal strobe-light show. The doc somehow managed to transmit the impression that he had just discovered astronomy. Listening to him was like leafing through the old Book of Knowledge, with its pictures of how long it would take railroad trains to get to the moon, sun, Alpha Centauri and points east. Worlds opened, literally. Whole galaxies. The ideas intoxicated.Except the Book of Knowledge never messed with politics. Mind-expanding as it was, it knew its limits. Its drug was a childhood awe, not cannabis. I once heard Carl Sagan at an editorial writers' convention on the subject of, alas, not the stars, but arms control. He made the kinds of folks who organized Peace Links sound like hard-nosed realists.Most of those who thought of the Soviet Union as just another misunderstood country -- moral equivalence was all the rage at the time -- were under the influence of a muddled ideology. Carl Sagan sounded as if he were beyond any influence at all, just lost in the stars. When he explained how peace-loving the Soviets were, you knew he really should have stuck to analyzing a whole other breed of stellar red dwarfs.Now it has been revealed to a waiting world that Sagan was the author of a previously anonymous essay promoting the loco weed in a 1971 book, ``Reconsidering Marijuana.''Strangely enough, his authorship of the article is supposed to be an argument for using marijuana rather than against. We're supposed to believe that the world would be a far, far better place if more of us went around like Carl Sagan, speaking in italics all the time, with a kind of drifting, laid-back urgency. Cool. As if the world's supply of cosmic bores were in grave danger of being depleted unless we all lit up right now, man.This essay by Sagan, attributed to Mr. X, failed to achieve either the lucid style or remarkable influence of George Kennan's article under the same nom de plume in 1947. That's when the famous diplomat outlined the theory of containment that would win the Cold War. From Kennan to Sagan, Mr. X's style clearly had deteriorated. Markedly. You might even say it had gone up in smoke.In his essay, Dr. Sagan shared this memory, unfortunately: ``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. I wrote the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down.'' Why, sure. First things first.Fortunately, that's the last we hear of this revelation in (soft) soap. It's never made clear, and perhaps never was. Which was the problem with so many of Sagan's theories. They had this way of crossing from pop-sci to sci-fi at the drop of a toke. Though they all doubtless seemed clear at the high old time. Despite all our space probes since, man has yet to discover a galaxy as gaseous as Carl Sagan at his most expansive.Here's what impressed most on reading the AP dispatch about the smoky origins of the late Sagan's revelations: It was how closely his hazy position on arms control, coexistence and the essentially permanent and benign character of the Soviet Union tracked with that of . . . Arkansas' own foreign-policy maven at the time, J. William Fulbright.Now it's clear that Sagan was practicing high statecraft, very high. As for Sen. Fulbright, former titan, he seemed stone-cold sober when he expatiated on these topics, often to the plaudits of the punditry.The moral of this story: You don't have to take dope to have hallucinations. Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 121 E. Capitol Ave., Little Rock, Ark. 72201. Distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. Published: Wednesday September 22, 1999 © 1999 PioneerPlanet Biographer: Sagan Smoked Marijuana - 8/21/99http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread2573.shtml
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Comment #6 posted by Faker on September 17, 2000 at 17:27:40 PT
Inquiry
Greenberg wrote:"You don't have to take dope to have hallucinations."But the question is, do you have to hallucinate to write for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette?Faker
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Comment #5 posted by dave edwards on September 23, 1999 at 09:07:29 PT:
sagan
hoo-haw
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Comment #4 posted by Dr. Ganj on September 22, 1999 at 22:37:26 PT
Contact High
It's real easy to vilify someone who is gone, and who can not refute the true facts. Evidently, Mr. Greenberg didn't take the time to read "Contact" as it is replete with obvious genius, and hope for our species. At least hope for intrepid individuals who have looked far beyond our protected azure sphere.Dr. Sagan took chances, looked deeply, and loved deeply. That is far better than writing about other people, and looking for faults instead of accomplishments.Dr. Ganj 
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
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Comment #3 posted by Dankhank on September 22, 1999 at 19:23:42 PT:
Great man
After today when someone says Greenberg I will most likely say, "Who?"When you say Sagan I know instantly who he is/was.I will find out about a Gaussian Distribution Curve because Carl said it.Nothing Green? said will remain with me.Mr. G? missed the point that was made quite handily by Tom ...Carl was the space man extraordinaire. Luck, my man, I hope God is letting you travel the universe.
Hemp n Stuff
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Comment #2 posted by Tom on September 22, 1999 at 18:39:50 PT:
The real moral of the story
Actually, the moral of this article is that some people are so unwilling to give up dearly-held prejudices about marijuana and the people who use it that they will somehow persuade themselves that one of the most prominent and respected astronomers of the past few decades must have been "faking it" intellectually all these years simply because of new information about his personal habits. When Mr. Greenberg does as much as Carl Sagan did to popularize science for a generation of young kids, including myself, and especially when he shows that he knows what a Gaussian distribution curve is, then I will take what he has to say as something other than blind knee-jerk prejudice. 
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Comment #1 posted by J Christen-Mitchell on September 22, 1999 at 15:30:56 PT:
Out One More Out of Millions and Millions
In the movie " Pumping Iron " the hero makes a comeback and wins. Backstage after the contest the hero lays out on a sofa, says " I've been vaiting for this " and lites a big fat unit...So even the great Arnold Schwarzenegger can help to dispell two myths: amotivational syndrome and that you can't do smoke and be an athlete. Reissues of the video only show him toking...Many bodybuilders use smoke to comcentrate during workouts.
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