General Discussion

kpete

(71,981 posts) Thu Oct 9, 2014, 10:11 PM Oct 2014

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

“All over the country there are people having terminal cases of cancer or AIDS, who are given...huge doses of chemotherapeutic agents which force them to be nauseous, to be unable to take food, which then leads rapidly to their dwindling away because they can't eat. It's well-established that marijuana counteracts this nausea... Is it rational to forbid patients who are dying from taking marijuana as a palliative to permit them to gain body weight and to get some food down?... That's a highly irrational official government position...”
Carl SaganAstrophysicist & Author
http://marijuanamajority.com/?id=822

.....Sagan, who used marijuana to enhance his creativity and generate bold new ideas, never got to see the day when Americans could go to a store, buy marijuana and use it in the privacy of their own homes without fear of criminal prosecution.

But thanks to a huge collection of Sagan’s papers recently made available to the public for the first time at the Library of Congress, we’ve now been given greater insight into his deep thoughts on the drug war and related topics.

The documents confirm that Sagan, whose 1985 “Contact” novel includes a scene where a store in fictionalized future 1999 France is selling marijuana imported from California and Oregon, would’ve been thrilled to see the legalization era we’re entering now, even if we’ve taken a bit more time getting here than he once predicted (back during the height of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” crusade, no less).

He passed away just a few months after California voters made their state the first to legalize medical marijuana in 1996. Since then, 22 other states and the District of Columbia have passed laws allowing for medical use, and Colorado and Washington have legalized marijuana outright for all adults over 21.