Carl Sagan: The Stoner of Science

Who says pot makes you stupid and lazy?

Carl Sagan — astronomer, writer, science popularizer, and pop-culture icon — was, by almost any measure, one of the great intellectual heavyweights of the past century. His contributions to our understanding of the cosmos and to sharing that understanding with the general public are unmatched.

But one aspect of his life that has been little publicized is the fact that he was a full-on, Cheech & Chong grade stoner. Yes, that’s right. This decorated public intellectual, professor, and NASA investigator was a total pothead, and he loved it. In his own words:

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.

Although those “defects of society” and the ongoing status of cannabis as an illegal, Schedule 1 drug, that is, one having “a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision” prevented him from speaking about it as freely as he’d have liked to, he nonetheless managed to find public outlets for making his views known. And those views were unequivocal. As he put it:

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.

Soon after he began experimenting with smoking pot, around the age of forty, when he “had come to feel that there was more to living than science,” he began using it in a very deliberate and methodical way, both for the enjoyment it brought him and the insights it revealed. And there’s no question that he fully enjoyed its myriad pleasures. As he noted:

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before.

And it wasn’t just the visual arts he found enhanced through cannabis use, for he further remarked that:

A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis.

It’s not hard to imagine him kicking back with a joint while playing a vinyl of Dark Side of the Moon. And it was likely accompanied by Scooby Snacks too, for as anyone who’s ever had the munchies will agree:

The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation.

In addition to enjoying such aesthetic and culinary pleasures, Sagan was certainly no prude, describing in great detail how:

Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex — on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of images passing before my eyes.

Preach it, Carl! Truly, a man after my own heart.

And just in case there were any remaining doubts as to his full Half Baked level of stonerness, it should be noted that he, like millions of stoners before him and since, was utterly fascinated by the flickering mystique of a roaring fire:

Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.

How epic would it be to take bong hits with that guy and then sit around a hearth philosophizing while grubbing on Pirate’s Booty? (Or if you prefer, artisanal, whole-grained bread dipped in organic, extra virgin olive oil and imported balsamic vinegar. Whatever.)

But there was so much more to Sagan and his relationship with the herb. For, lest one get the impression that he used pot simply for hedonistic distraction, consider his more serious applications of its powers.

Being the brilliant and inquisitive intellectual that he was, his love of pot was in no way limited to its carnal delights. He equally enjoyed the loosening of mental filters it enabled and the unleashing of creative, otherwise suppressed thoughts it allowed, which dovetailed perfectly with his scientific pursuits. As he put it:

Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds.

He loved how getting high enabled him to step outside of himself and experience his own inner sensations from the perspective of a detached observer. As he put it:

There’s a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there’s another part of me which is a kind of observer. … The artist and viewer are one.

But perhaps the most powerful influence pot had on his outlook and his worldview was the way it shaped his views of society and his place within it. He described how:

Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness.

Being highly mathematical by nature, he wasn’t afraid to combine his scientific mindset with his newly awakened social conscience. For example, he described in detail one such experience and the profound effect it had on his later professional work. As he recalled:

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. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics.

How many of you have ever emerged from a shower and then proceeded to bust out eleven technical essays in one sitting? And all while high as fuck! It’s impressive, to say the least.

Perhaps my favorite takeaway from Sagan’s views on getting high was his firm belief that pot could serve as a gateway — not to harder drugs and a life of addiction, as the D.A.R.E program would have us believe — but rather, to deep insights about life, the universe, and everything. As he stated:

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights.

It’s truly a shame that over fifty years after these words were written, we, as a society, continue to persecute and disparage those who seek similar insights by partaking of a natural plant that’s been used by countless cultures around the world for millennia. And it’s a shame, following Sagan’s untimely death from a bone marrow disease at the age of sixty-two, that we no longer get to enjoy the brilliance and compassion of this incredible man. Rest in peace, Carl. Your wit and your wisdom are sorely missed.

Colby Hess is a freelance writer and photographer from Seattle, and author of the freethinker children’s book The Stranger of Wigglesworth.

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