Something to think about before you judge someone who is smoking weed.
Steve Jobs – It’s verified, the Apple co-founder smoked marijuana and took LSD in his 1st semester at the Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1972. Since he dropped out of school, he was already on his way to becoming one of the most successful and richest man in the united states. In 1984, he received the National Medal of Technology. In 2007, Fortune Magazine named him the most powerful person in business. He was inducted into the California Hall of Fame. Fortune named him CEO of the Decade in 2009. Forbes ranked him #57 on their list of the World’s Most Powerful People that same year. The Financial Times named Steven Jobs for person of the year for 2010. Steve Jobs left us in 2011.
“The best way to describe the effects of marijuana and hashish is that makes me feel relaxed and creative,” Steve Jobs
Carl Sagan – It’s hard to dispute for pot slowing you down when looking at the record of Carl Sagan. Supposedly, a confirmed and admitted marijuana smoker, among his many accomplishements are a Pulitzer Prize, an Emmy, a best-selling novel, as well as over 500 science papers and articles. He was a founding member of the Planetary Society, and he won a pipe load of scientific awards. He is said to have believed in the validity of cannabis smokers insights.
Kary Mullis – Another Nobel Prize winner, another marijuana smoker. Mullis did try heavier drugs than just pot. He's the one who invented the polymerase chain reaction. It allows duplication of parts of DNA. He says acid helped him to develop it, perhaps along with marijuana, which he supposedly smoked right before his first trip. While most of us have trouble figuring out how a chair works when we’re high, this guy was working out how to mimic nature.
Francis Crick – Winner of a Nobel Prize for figuring out the double-helix structure of DNA. Rumor has it that he was taking acid at the time. Crick was not the first to see twin twisted monsters coming at him during an acid plunge, but he was the first to recognize as an important scientific discovery. As a founding member of Soma, a legalize cannabis group, he also experimented pot, which he believed helped to remove the filters of abstract thought.
Margaret Mead – When she died in 1978, Mead was possibly the most famous Anthropologist on earth. Time had named her Mother of the World in 1969. She authored or co-authored around 40 books, received 28 honorary doctorates, and was President of both the American Anthropological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Most famously, she testified before Congress on the legalization of marijuana. She testified on lots of stuff, but it’s this one everyone remembers.
Andrew Weil – Weil has medical and biology degrees from Harvard, is a naturopath, as well as a widely acknowledged expert on medicinal herbs, alternative medicines, and mind and body interactions. He was on the cover of Time, has written a bunch of books, and used to write for High Times. He talks about the advantages of thinking under the influence of marijuana, as well as an innate need to alter consciousness.
Oliver Sacks – If you’ve seen the movie “Awakenings” with Robin Williams, you probably know something of Oliver Sacks’ work. He’s a neurologist, the film based on his book of the same name. He also wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks is an Oxford graduate and professor of neurology at Columbia Medical Center. He’s been referred to as the poet laureate of medicine, and received several awards and honorary doctorates in the field of neurological science. Not bad for a man who’s admitted to using marijuana on a more that recreational level, seeing it as a potential gateway to other minds and other consciousnesses.
Richard Feynman – Physicist who helped design the atomic bomb. Well, nobody said anyone on this list was brilliant, just smarter than average. Feynman used marijuana to enhance his out of body experiences while in a sensory deprivation tank. When he came out, he won a Nobel Prize for his theory of quantum electrodynamics.
Sergey Brin – He has a BS from the University of Maryland, a MS from Stanford and took PhD courses at Stanford before putting that on hiatus to co-found Google with Larry Page. His dad’s a math professor at the University of Maryland. His mom’s a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. His wife, Ann Wojcicki, is a biotech analyst who graduated with a B.S. in biology from Yale in 1996. She and Brin are working with leading researchers to help doctors, patients, and researchers analyze the human genome data and try to repair “bugs” as if DNA were HTML. He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, which is “among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer” and received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the “Highest Award in Engineering”. Like Jobs (see above), he’s among the wealthiest in the world.
Stephen Jay Gould -Paleontologist, biologist, science historian. Most known scientific contribution was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which says that most evolution is marked by long periods of stability. Kind of like most of us after a good bong hit. One of the most influential and best read writers of popular science, Gould became an advocate for medical marijuana following his diagnosis with cancer. He claimed it had an “important effect” on his recovery. He also testified in court to the benefits of marijuana, and is quoted as saying “it is beyond my comprehension that any humane person would withhold such a beneficial substance from people in such great need simple because others use it for different purposes.”
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