Sagan’s endorsement also doesn’t negate the adverse side effects of the stuff that comes along with heavy usage such as reduced motivation, memory issues, and an inability to create long-term plans.Īs marijuana becomes increasingly legal, accepted, and commonplace we will have to answer questions about what it can do for us, both good and bad. This means that you shouldn’t think that you’re going to be the next big thing in science education just because you smoke a joint. Of course, these supposed benefits took place because of his temperance and skepticism to the idea that every highdea was brilliant. Though it must be noted that he didn’t list any specific instances in his article of any great ideas devised while high. He also argued that it allowed him to better understand social issues, which he began to comment on more frequently in his later years.
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“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.” Lastly, he argues for outright legalization in light of these benefits: “Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity… the actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.” He also thought it dramatically improved his sex life, as he analytically explains here:
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I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me.” For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse… A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I’m down.
“The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. He found that the drug was able to help him understand art and music in ways he had never been able to before: Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.” Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won’t attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. “When I’m high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. In addition, it helped him to better understand himself: The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: ‘did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.’ When high on cannabis I discovered that there’s somebody inside in those people we call mad.” In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums.
“A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word ‘crazy’ to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. He found the drug to be extremely useful in helping him understand people who he would usually write off as mad, as he describes here: As a result of altering his consciousness by smoking marijuana, he alleged that many things that he was previously unable to appreciate or notice became available to him even when he sobered up.