The Policy on Cannabis is Bad Science – Letters from Carl Sagan

The Policy on Cannabis is Bad Science - Letters from Carl Sagan | Third Monk image 6

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Carl Sagan never got to see the day when people could go to a store and purchase weed without fear of the law. But thanks to a collection of his papers recently made available by the Library of Congress, we now have Sagan’s personal writings on cannabis.

This 1988 Sagan letter shows why a government-funded scientist might be reluctant to draw too much public attention to his views about marijuana in the midst of President Reagan’s drug war.

Writing to Dr. Grinspoon (editor of Sagan’s famous essay on the benefits of cannabis), Sagan expressed outrage about language in a congressional funding bill for NASA that required contractors like him to adopt written anti-drug-use policies:

The oath required seems to smack of prior restraint and is unsymmetrical with respect to other crimes.

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Annie Druyan confirmed Sagan enjoyed marijuana “frequently.” She made it clear just how important cannabis was in their life together: “We smoked the way other American families would have wine with dinner. For us, it was our sacrament. It was something that made a great life sweeter in every possible way.”

Druyan also described how Sagan utilized marijuana’s medicinal properties to experience a measure of relief. He used cannabis to treat “not only the lack of appetite and the nausea [from chemotherapy]but to refocus on the beauty of life in the midst of such torture.”

The plant’s effects directly impacted the couple’s work over their decades of collaboration on everything from “Contact” to the 1980 PBS series “Cosmos” that Sagan hosted and that they wrote together. The 2014 Fox reboot of “Cosmos” — hosted this time by Neil deGrasse Tyson and again co-written by Druyan — not only took home four Emmys, but made mention in one episode of 17th Century scientist Robert Hooke’s use of cannabis while describing him as “possibly the most inventive person who ever lived.”

War on Drugs or War on Consciousness?

This disconnect from science was among Sagan’s chief concerns about the criminalization of marijuana. It was “something that particularly infuriated Carl as a scientist,” Druyan says. He was troubled by not only the “bad civic engineering but the very bad science behind prohibition.”

In 1990, Sagan wrote to leading drug policy reform campaigners suggesting they organize a rebuttal to the propaganda being spread by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America:

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In another letter from 1990 Sagan laid out these fundamental philosophical questions underpinning America’s drug war:

Why are all “drugs” lumped together in American rhetoric and public policy questions?

Why are hallucinogenic drugs so widely distributed among the cultures of the Earth?

Do research findings that indicate a given drug to be safe get as much public attention as those that indicate it to be dangerous?

How do social and economic inequities drive the underprivileged to drug use?

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With the success the Cosmos reboot and with more states voting on legalizing marijuana in November, the newly unearthed Sagan documents add to the growing consensus that marijuana prohibition is not grounded in science and is not supported by leading thinkers and prominent people.

“We are going at warp speed toward getting rid of that prohibition now,” says Grinspoon.

Carl Sagan’s Long Lost Deep Thoughts On The War on Drugs | Marijuana News

The Most Astounding Fact in the Universe – Neil deGrasse Tyson (Video)

The Most Astounding Fact in the Universe - Neil deGrasse Tyson (Video) | Third Monk image 1

Halley Dust and Milky Way by Mike Taylor

Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked:

What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?

The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth the atoms that make up the human body are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures.

These stars, the high mass ones among them went unstable in their later years they collapsed and then exploded scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas cloud that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems stars with orbiting planets, and those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.

So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small because they’re small and the Universe is big – but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity.

That’s really what you want in life, you want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant you want to feel like a participant in the goings on of activities and events around you That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive… – Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Science and Religion Are Not Compatible – Neil deGrasse Tyson (Video)

Science and Religion Are Not Compatible - Neil deGrasse Tyson (Video) | Third Monk image 1

Neil deGrasse Tyson explained the relaunch of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, a series meant to promote science literacy and discussion about our place in the universe. During a segment about the Big Bang (16:46), Tyson disputed the notion that religion and science could coexist when trying to understand the nature of existence:

Moyers: Do you give people who make this case, that that was the beginning and that there had to be something that provoked the beginning, do you give them an A at least for trying to reconcile faith and reason?

Tyson: I don’t think they’re reconcilable.

Moyers: What do you mean?

Tyson: Well, so let me say that differently. All efforts that have been invested by brilliant people of the past have failed at that exercise. They just fail. And so I don’t, the track record is so poor that going forward, I have essentially zero confidence, near zero confidence, that there will be fruitful things to emerge from the effort to reconcile them.

So, for example, if you knew nothing about science, and you read, say, the Bible, the Old Testament, which in Genesis, is an account of nature, that’s what that is, and I said to you, give me your description of the natural world based only on this, you would say the world was created in six days, and that stars are just little points of light much lesser than the sun. And that in fact, they can fall out of the sky, right, because that’s what happens during the Revelation.

You know, one of the signs that the second coming, is that the stars will fall out of the sky and land on Earth. To even write that means you don’t know what those things are. You have no concept of what the actual universe is. So everybody who tried to make proclamations about the physical universe based on Bible passages got the wrong answer.

So what happened was, when science discovers things, and you want to stay religious, or you want to continue to believe that the Bible is unerring, what you would do is you would say, “Well, let me go back to the Bible and reinterpret it.” Then you’d say things like, “Oh, well they didn’t really mean that literally. They meant that figuratively.”

So, this whole sort of reinterpretation of the, how figurative the poetic passages of the Bible are came after science showed that this is not how things unfolded. And so the educated religious people are perfectly fine with that. It’s the fundamentalists who want to say that the Bible is the literally, literal truth of God, that and want to see the Bible as a science textbook, who are knocking on the science doors of the schools, trying to put that content in the science room. Enlightened religious people are not behaving that way. So saying that science is cool, we’re good with that, and use the Bible for, to get your spiritual enlightenment and your emotional fulfillment.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson – Aliens Don’t Respect Human Intelligence (Video)

Neil deGrasse Tyson - Aliens Don't Respect Human Intelligence (Video) | Third Monk

Neil deGrasse Tyson feels that humans wrongly assume that we are of high enough intelligence to interest alien visitors.

Any species capable of interstellar travel would see human civilization as severely underdeveloped. Humans have escaped the Earth’s atmosphere, but just barely, Tyson explained:

If an alien traversed that distance, and all we are doing is driving around the block, they’re way more advanced than we are.

Neil deGrasse Tyson – How Alien Scientists Would Treat the Smartest Humans

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Funks the Universe, Psychedelic Music Video

Neil deGrasse Tyson Funks the Universe, Psychedelic Music Video | Third Monk

Neil deGrasse Tyson‘s interview on the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is remixed into a funky psychedelic music video about the universe. (Animated by Andy Greenhaw)

In our experience, the Universe never makes anything in ones. When we thought Earth was it. No, Earth is one of many planets. The Sun is! No, the Sun is one of a billion stars in the Milky Way. The Milky Way! No, no there are a hundred other billion galaxies in the Universe.

The Universe? Well we’ve been there before. Am I going to say there’s only one? Because the trend says more. So maybe there’s this Multiverse.

Let’s just continue to push the question a little deeply. If this “entity” never makes anything in ones, then why would it only make one Multiverse? Maybe there are multiple Multiverses.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson – Maybe We’re Not As Smart As We Think We Are (Video)

Neil deGrasse Tyson - Maybe We're Not As Smart As We Think We Are (Video) | Third Monk

Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one percent difference in DNA. It has to, ’cause that’s the difference. The Hubble telescope, these grand… that’s in that one percent.

Maybe… everything that we are that is not the chimp is not as smart compared to the chimp as we tell ourselves it is.

Maybe the difference between constructing and launching a Hubble telescope, and a chimp combining two finger motions as sign language – maybe that difference is not all that great. We tell ourselves it is.

Just the same way we label our books optical illusions. We tell ourselves it’s a lot. Maybe it’s almost nothing. How would we decide that?

Imagine another life form that’s one percent different from us.

In the direction that we are different from the chimp.

Think about that.

We have one percent difference and we’re building the Hubble telescope. Go another one percent.

What are we to they? We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence. That’s what we would be.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Animation by PersonifciationOfMe

Neil deGrasse Tyson – We Stopped Dreaming, Imbalance of NASA and Military Budget (Video)

Neil deGrasse Tyson - We Stopped Dreaming, Imbalance of NASA and Military Budget (Video) | Third Monk image 4

The intention of the Penny 4 NASA project is to stress the importance of advancing the space frontier and is focused on igniting scientific curiosity in the general public.

Neil deGrasse Tyson – We Stopped Dreaming

Spending Resources in the Wrong Places

I’m tired of saying this but I have to say it again! The NASA budget is 4/10’s of one penny on a tax dollar. If I held up a tax dollar and I cut horizontally into it 4/10’s of 1% of its width, it doesn’t even get you into the ink! SO I WILL NOT ACCEPT A STATEMENT THAT SAYS “WE CAN”T AFFORD IT!”

Do you realize that the 850 billion dollar bank bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50 year running budget of NASA. And so when somebody says we don’t have enough money for the space program I’m asking its not that you don’t have enough money , its that the distribution of money your spending is warped, in some way that your removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow, the home of tomorrow, the city of tomorrow, the transportation of tomorrow, all that ended in the 1970’s after we stopped going to the moon, it all ended, we stopped dreaming. So, I worry that the decisions that congress make doesn’t factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow. They’re playing for the quarterly report, they’re playing for the next election cycle and that is mortgaging the actual future of this nation, tomorrows gone.

Neil deGrasse Tyson – A New Perspective

Dissolving Our Artificial Boundaries

Photo of Earth. Rising over the lunar landscape. Earthrise over the moon. There was Earth. Seen not as the mapmaker would have you identify it. No. The countries were not color coded with boundaries. It was seen as nature intended it to be viewed. Oceans. Land. Clouds.

We went to the moon and we discovered Earth! I claim we discovered Earth. For the first time. How does that affect culture? I got a list! The instance that photo comes out, that is the identifying cover picture of the whole Earth catalog. Thinking of Earth as a whole. Not as a place where nations war. As a whole.

Imbalance of the NASA Budget

NASA Vs Military Budget Pie Chart Comparison

 

Decrease of NASA Budget Allocation

 

Choice Between Discovery and Destruction