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.
Fantastic article
Gabrielle Bellot on the Many Benefits of Marijuana (and a Man Who Was Ahead of His Time)
In 1971, a year after Richard Nixon signed into law the Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Prevention Act—a statute that, amongst other things, created the five federal schedules for drugs we still have today and greatly exacerbated America’s War on Drugs—a curious book about cannabis appeared under the title Marihuana Reconsidered.
Primarily written by Lester Grinspoon, a former opponent of cannabis, the book and its title may appear tame today, but in 1971, it seemed incendiary. Under Nixon’s then-new legislation, cannabis—which had exploded in popularity in America in the 1960s—was placed in Schedule I, the most restrictive category of narcotics, reflecting the widespread belief at the time that marijuana was the lethal, life-and-society-destroying drug portrayed so baroquely in the propaganda film Reefer Madness four decades earlier.
Grinspoon, however, had spent years studying marijuana without observing these putative detrimental effects, and the book—along with a 1969 article by Grinspoon in Scientific American—represented a literary-scientific turning point in understanding cannabis at a crucial moment.
Despite its sociopolitical significance, the book is perhaps best remembered for a brief personal essay by the beloved popular scientist Carl Sagan, penned under the pseudonym Mr. X, on the effects of cannabis. Sagan, who was a close friend of Grinspoon’s, smoked weed for much of his life, though he kept it private to avoid the societal stigma. Grinspoon’s studies actually began in part to dissuade Sagan’s cannabis usage, yet, as Sagan knew well by the time of the book’s release, marijuana not only was fairly safe; it was also, as Sagan suggested, a kind of heart-and-mind-opener, a herb that, with patience and a willingness to learn from rather than fighting or predefining the high, could show one the world as if for the first time.
I’ve long found Sagan’s essay charming, partly because Sagan is so rarely depicted in pop culture as a pothead, partly for its unassuming simplicity, partly for the obvious love Sagan displays for his subject—and, notably, his repudiation of the drug’s illegality. In the wake of the Biden administration’s historic bid to reschedule cannabis to the less restrictive Schedule III (along with ketamine and codeine), I find myself returning to the essay, which was gently historic in its own right.
Cannabis has offered me things its pop-culture depictions never prepared me for.
If you knew me growing up, this focus might seem out-of-character. For much of my life, I was terrified by the idea of not being in control of my mind. As a weird, closeted, unpopular kid, I was bullied often, and for years I was afraid of even getting drunk, much less high, lest I give my bullies something worse to joke about. If I couldn’t control my life, at least I could—I reasoned—control my mind.
Over time, I mellowed out about drinking, and I experimented on occasion with edibles, which, as Sagan also experienced, made sex and frivolity especially delightful. Under that green enchantment, my wife and I also grew even closer, having special moments where our love for each other felt practically palpable.
But in the last two years, after some unexpectedly transformative psychedelic journeys, my relationship with cannabis has likewise deepened. So often, weed is portrayed simplistically in American pop culture as something that makes you giggle, fall asleep, forget things, or come up with tinfoil-hat-worthy theories, as well as a (divisive) medical tool; while it can do all of those things, and certainly is medicine for many, I see it more as a teacher, a herb that, like any substance, you come to appreciate more when you try to listen to whatever it may be trying to offer you in the moment. This Weltanschauung is more akin to many indigenous traditions surrounding herbal medicine, wherein plants each have unique spirits, unique characters that we can learn from if we take the time.
And cannabis has offered me things its pop-culture depictions never prepared me for. Under that fey haze, it feels so easy to awe at the mundane details of the world, like the fractal patterns in a leaf, or the starlike glister of certain sidewalk blocks, glorious in their own way as Keats’s Grecian urn; or, on heavier trips, to feel inextricably connected to the universe at large, like a leaf growing out of a grand tree, as Alan Watts puts it in The Book, rather than a separate being adrift in an inexplicable cosmos.
I first experienced this on psilocybin trips, and cannabis, to my surprise, helped me explore this sensation anew, like a gentler psychedelic. It’s become a significant feeling for me, one that brings me comfort in a country so sepulchrally polarized—separated—at present.
Marijuana reconsidered, indeed.
Perhaps fittingly, Sagan—famed for his sentiment that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”—first approached weed as a skeptic. “My initial experiences,” he wrote, “were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry.” But after a few attempts, “it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend’s living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows.”
Sagan began recording his ideas while stoned, convinced that “the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights…”
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