Relato De Carl Sagan Sobre Efeitos Da Cannabis

[Vovô da Lapa]

By Carl Sagan

This account was written in 1969 for publication in Marihuana

Reconsidered (1971). Sagan was in his mid-thirties at that time. He

continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life.

It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more

relaxed period in my life - a time when I had come to feel that there

was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social

consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new

experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who

occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure.

Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that

cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological

addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial

experiences 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. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however,

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. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find

inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling.

But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even

the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I

was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my

eyelids. Flash . . . a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue

sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the

horizon. . . Flash . . . same scene, orange house, brown sky, red

clouds, yellow path, violet fields . . . Flash . . . Flash . . .

Flash. The flashes came about once a heartbeat. Each flash brought the

same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of

colors . . . exquisitely deep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in

their juxtaposition. Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed

it thoroughly. It amplifies torpid sensibilities and produces what to

me are even more interesting effects, as I will explain shortly.

I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which

I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame,

standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked

Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry

bottle. 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.

I want to explain that at no time did I think these things 'really'

were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and

there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don't feel any

contradiction in these experiences. 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. About half of

the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the

creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the

pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose

cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror

that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it's

my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to.

While my early perceptions were all visual, and curiously lacking in

images of human beings, both of these items have changed over the

intervening years. I find that today a single joint is enough to get

me high. I test whether I'm high by closing my eyes and looking for

the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations in my

visual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise

problem, the visual noise level being very low with my eyes closed.

Another interesting information-theoretical aspects is the prevalence

- at least in my flashed images - of cartoons: just the outlines of

figures, caricatures, not photographs. I think this is simply a matter

of information compression; it would be impossible to grasp the total

content of an image with the information content of an ordinary

photograph, say 108 bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash

occupies. And the flash experience is designed, if I may use that

word, for instant appreciation. The artist and viewer are one. This is

not to say that the images are not marvelously detailed and complex. I

recently had an image in which two people were talking, and the words

they were saying would form and disappear in yellow above their heads,

at about a sentence per heartbeat. In this way it was possible to

follow the conversation. At the same time an occasional word would

appear in red letters among the yellows above their heads, perfectly

in context with the conversation; but if one remembered these red

words, they would enunciate a quite different set of statements,

penetratingly critical of the conversation. The entire image set which

I've outlined here, with I would say at least 100 yellow words and

something like 10 red words, occurred in something under a minute.

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art,

a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding

of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes

carries over to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers

which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some

art-related insights - I don't know whether they are true or false,

but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time

high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some

years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank

exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef.

In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which

made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps

Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.

A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred

with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the

separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the

counterpoint. 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. Again, the learning

experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I'm

down. 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. A potato will have a

texture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more

so. 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 image passing

before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen

greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which

comes with cannabis smoking.

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but

there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity

in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings,

both animate and inanimate. 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. Both of these senses of the absurd can be

communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been

in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an

awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and

forget and put out of our minds. 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. In the Soviet Union

political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. 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.

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. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences

in childhood events only half understood at the time. 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. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays

on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.

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; the main problem is putting

these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that

we are when we're down the next day. Some of the hardest work I've

ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing.

The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to

be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why

someone might think it's a waste of effort going to all that trouble

to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic.

But since I live almost all my life down I've made the effort -

successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good

insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has

been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or

tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the

following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an

effort to remember, I never do.

I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social

issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I

am generally known for. 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. Because

of problems of space, I can't go into the details of these essays, but

from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert

commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in

university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.

But let me try to at least give the flavor of such an insight and its

accompaniments. One night, high on cannabis, I was delving into my

childhood, a little self-analysis, and making what seemed to me to be

very good progress. I then paused and thought how extraordinary it was

that Sigmund Freud, with no assistance from drugs, had been able to

achieve his own remarkable self-analysis. But then it hit me like a

thunderclap that this was wrong, that Freud had spent the decade

before his self-analysis as an experimenter with and a proselytizer

for cocaine; and it seemed to me very apparent that the genuine

psychological insights that Freud brought to the world were at least

in part derived from his drug experience. I have no idea whether this

is in fact true, or whether the historians of Freud would agree with

this interpretation, or even if such an idea has been published in the

past, but it is an interesting hypothesis and one which passes first

scrutiny in the world of the downs.

I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to

be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a

religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and

perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical

scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the

morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there

is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one

with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately

frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know

about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to

take such remarks seriously. I say 'Listen closely, you sonofabitch of

the morning! This stuff is real!' I try to show that my mind is

working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I

have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography,

and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass

critical scrutiny in the morning. 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. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to

intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a

vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and

choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if

two people are reading each other's minds.

Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like

to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am

neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work?

While I find a curious disinclination to think of my professional

concerns when high - the attractive intellectual adventures always

seem to be in every other area - I have made a conscious effort to

think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field

when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear,

for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be

mutually inconsistent. So far, so good. At least the recall works.

Then in trying to conceive of a way of reconciling the disparate

facts, I was able to come up with a very bizarre possibility, one that

I'm sure I would never have thought of down. I've written a paper

which mentions this idea in passing. I think it's very unlikely to be

true, but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, which

is the hallmark of an acceptable theory.

I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of

your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take

you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced

to drive in heavy traffic when high. I've negotiated it with no

difficult at all, though I did have some thoughts about the marvelous

cherry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the drive I'm

not high at all. There are no flashes on the insides of my eyelids. If

you're high and your child is calling, you can respond about as

capably as you usually do. I don't advocate driving when high on

cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experience that it

certainly can be done. My high is always reflective, peaceable,

intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and

there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly

smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce the same degree of

high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just

by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater.

There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a

very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its

effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is

there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to

the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity.

R is very large for LSD (which I've never taken) and reasonably short

for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of

psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this

ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time

isn't too distant; 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.

[didimoco]

O final é antológico "A ilegalidade da cannabis é um impedimento ultrajante, da total utilização da droga que ajuda a produzir serenidade, insights, sensitividade e camaradagem tao desesperadamente necessarias neste mundo de crescente loucura e perigo". - Carl Sagan

[Canadense]

pra quem num sabe Carl Sagan foi um astrofisico do nivel do michio kaku, ou neils degrasse tyson...

escreveu e tb foi quem apresentou na TV o Cosmos.. que vale muito a pena ver...

[bon vivant]

Alguem pra traduzir aí????

[dhaze]

depoimento enrriquecedor...leitura obrigatoria

[bon vivant]

Passa o link aí casoy...

[Carlindo Perleira]

Essa fonte é fidedigna vovô? Parece que esse assunto da ganja na vida dele é meio controverso, dizem que ele nunca falou disso abertamente.

Viva Carl Sagan! Já li uns 6 livros dele (O mundo assombrado pelos demônios, Contato, Bilhões e Bilhões etc). Porém, não conhecia esse aspecto da vida dele.

Casoy, pesquisei na net e a fonte é fidedigna, sim. Parece que o assunto não é controverso. A wikipedia cita as seguintes fontes e biografias para confirmar esse hábito dele:

^ Grinspoon, Lester (1994). Marihuana Reconsidered (2nd ed.). Oakland, CA: Quick American Archives. ISBN 0-932-55113-0.

^ Sagan, Carl. "Mr. X". Marijuana-Uses.com. http://www.marijuana-uses.com/essays/002.html. Retrieved on 2009-08-07.

^ Whitehouse, David (1999-10-15). "Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos". BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/475954.stm. Retrieved on 2007-05-02.

^ Davidson, Keay (1999-08-22). "US: Billions and Billions of '60s Flashbacks". San Francisco Examiner. http://www.druglibrary.org/think/~jnr/sagan.htm. Retrieved on 2007-05-02.

^ Larsen, Dana (1999-11-01). "Carl Sagan: Toking Astronomer". Cannabis Culture Magazine. http://cannabisculture.com/articles/63.html. Retrieved on 2007-05-02.

[aleluia]

Já tinha lido isso de outra fonte...

deu até vontade de queimar um

[Agreste]

o cara é um danado

imagina se ele tivesse tomado LSD ou algum Enteógeno..

:fuma:

[mateuscks]

Carl Sagan é mestre.

É interessante ver escrito pelas palvras dele aquilo que eu acabo passando praticamente quase todos os dias.

Texto lindo, de verdade.

Leiam altos.