{"id":7668,"date":"2017-08-21T19:22:19","date_gmt":"2017-08-21T19:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.420magazine.com\/?p=6478"},"modified":"2017-08-21T19:22:19","modified_gmt":"2017-08-21T19:22:19","slug":"it-must-be-written-in-the-stars-neil-degrasse-tyson-says-marijuana-should-be-legal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/it-must-be-written-in-the-stars-neil-degrasse-tyson-says-marijuana-should-be-legal\/","title":{"rendered":"It Must Be Written In The Stars. Neil deGrasse Tyson Says Marijuana Should Be Legal"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"wp_fb_like_button\" style=\"margin:5px 0 5px 5px;float:right;height:100px;\"><script src=\"http:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/all.js#xfbml=1\"><\/script><fb:like href=\"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/it-must-be-written-in-the-stars-neil-degrasse-tyson-says-marijuana-should-be-legal\/\" send=\"true\" layout=\"standard\" width=\"450\" show_faces=\"false\" font=\"arial\" action=\"like\" colorscheme=\"light\"><\/fb:like><\/div><p>Neil deGrasse Tyson has become the new face of science across the United States, taking up the mantle from the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan.<\/p>\n<p>He appears frequently on television to talk about science, as Sagan did. He hosted an updated version of the television series, \u201cCosmos,\u201d originally hosted by Sagan.<\/p>\n<p>And now he\u2019s also followed Sagan on another issue. He believes marijuana should be legal. More than that, he believes it never should have been illegal in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think if you really analyze it, relative to other things that are legal, there\u2019s no reason for it to ever have been made illegal in the system of laws,\u201d Tyson said in an interview widely circulated on the Internet in August.<\/p>\n<p>He added, \u201cI mean, alcohol is legal, and it can mess you up way more than smoking a few J&#8217;s.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><b>Sagan\u2019s View<\/b><\/p>\n<p>In the interview, Tyson made it clear he hasn\u2019t been around people who use marijuana in some time, joking about the archaic phrase \u201csmoking a few J&#8217;s.\u201d In that respect, he differs from Sagan.<\/p>\n<p>Sagan used marijuana for most of his life. He also wrote about marijuana anonymously for a 1969 book, \u201cMarihuana Reconsidered.\u201d Writing under the name Mr. X, Sagan argued that cannabis improved the experience of eating, music and even sex.<\/p>\n<p>Sagan also wrote that marijuana gave him \u201ca feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Reading the entire essay is like taking a trip into Sagan\u2019s thinking about art and society in that era. There also are some admittedly trippy moments, like seeing a Volkswagen in the shadows on the ceiling cast by a house plant.<\/p>\n<p>He also writes that while taking a shower with his wife under the influence of marijuana, he had sudden insights into the \u201corigins and invalidities of racism in terms of Gaussian distribution curves.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><b>Marijuana Illegality<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Marijuana became a Schedule 1 illegal drug in the early 1970s under the administration of President Richard Nixon. Then Attorney General John Mitchell made a schedule of illegal drugs and put marijuana in the most dangerous category.<\/p>\n<p>Congress approved it and it\u2019s been there ever since. The Drug Enforcement Agency, created by Nixon in 1973, spearheads enforcement of federal laws on marijuana and other drugs.<\/p>\n<p>In suggesting that marijuana should never have been illegal, Tyson may have been referring to medical studies over the years.<\/p>\n<p>The American Medical Association initially opposed making marijuana illegal. In 1944, a commission created by the New York Academy of Medicine questioned the reasoning behind making marijuana illegal. They concluded that marijuana is not a gateway drug, does not lead to crime and is not physically addictive.<\/p>\n<p>The very commission Nixon formed, the Schafer Commission, recommended that marijuana be taken off the illegal drugs schedule and regulated more from a public health perspective. They compared marijuana to how the government approaches regulation of alcohol.<\/p>\n<p>Transcripts of the White House tapes made by Nixon show he wanted laws against marijuana before the commission report was even delivered.<\/p>\n<p><b>The War on Drugs<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Others have pointed to racism behind the movement to make marijuana illegal. Historian Martin Lee told Scientific American that newspapers in white areas of the deeply segregated nation promoted ideas such as \u201cthis stuff makes white women and black men have sex.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And in a controversial interview published in Harper\u2019s magazine last year, Nixon\u2019s Chief of Staff John Ehrlichman admitted that the War on Drugs started by Nixon originated with the Republican president\u2019s need to deal with \u201ctwo enemies\u201d: anti-war protestors and black people.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe knew we couldn\u2019t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,\u201d he told author Dan Baum.<\/p>\n<p>\u201dWe could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><img src=\"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/it-must-be-written-in-the-stars-neil-degrasse-tyson-says-marijuana-should-be-legal.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<p>News Moderator: Ron Strider <a href=\"http:\/\/www.420magazine.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">420 MAGAZINE \u00ae<\/a><br \/>\nFull Article: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.entrepreneur.com\/article\/298879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">It Must Be Written In the Stars. Neil deGrasse Tyson Says Marijuana Should Be Legal.<\/a><br \/>\nContact: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.entrepreneur.com\/contact\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Entrepreneur &#8211; Contact Us<\/a><br \/>\nPhoto Credit: Getty Images<br \/>\nWebsite: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.entrepreneur.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Entrepreneur &#8211; Start, run and grow your business.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Neil deGrasse Tyson has become the new face of science across the United States, taking up the mantle from the&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.420magazine.com\/2017\/08\/must-written-stars-neil-degrasse-tyson-says-marijuana-legal\/\" class=\"read-more\">[Read More]<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2355,9,1,3],"tags":[4922],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7668"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7668\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}