From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: sci.physics,talk.religion.buddhism,alt.zen,sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: Randi Confirms Feynman's Drug Use (was: Re: Physicists on LSD (was 
	Re: Infinite Multiverses?))
Date: 26 Aug 1999 14:10:10 GMT

In <7q23ib$of7$1@nnrp1.deja.com> pietzsche@my-deja.com writes:
>>
>For those who missed last sunday's excerpts from Keay Davidson's
>new Sagan bio, here are the highlights:
>
>'hey lester, gimme that last joint will ya?
> i got some reeeeal important research to do tomorrow!'
>-the late lamented C.Sagan paraphrased
>
>"listen up, you supposedly sober person of the next morning,
> this stuff is REAL!"
>-the late lamented C.Sagan  paraphrased

COMMENT

   I have to repeat my "Sagan story," as told to me by Leary.  In the
late 60's, Leary has been arrested for marijuana and sent to prison,
where he is given a psych test for prisoners, which predicts how good a
prisoner they will be.  The test turns out to be a standard one that
Leary himself had invented years before when a professor at Harvard,
only his captors are too dumb to know they are giving the test to the
psychologist who wrote it.  So Leary does not enlighten them, takes it,
and does it to give himself a score which will make him a minimum
escape risk.  They put him in minimum security and he escapes.  They
don't catch him until he's in Afganistan.  They want him BAD.  When
they get him back in prison (now the notorious Folsom Prison, circa
1973), he's now naturally in max security, as an escapee.  Inside he
uses the time to write a little book about space travel (Terra II) with
a another con named Wayne Benner.  It advocates space migration as the
ultimate destiny for man.

   About this time Sagan, who is anti-human space travel because he
wants the money spent on robot missions to the planets (a lot cheaper)
has gone to prison specifically to get Leary to change his mind. (As it
happens, Sagan himself later famously changed his mind on the subject,
but this would be years and years later).  So the earnest Sagan is
visiting Leary, and finds that at the time the prison is in lock-down
because of some riots by a prisoner named Juan Corona, and all the max
security prisoners are in shackles, as a matter of policy.  So here is
Leary chained up in a max security cell in a dungeon for having
posessed marijuana, and Sagan is grilling him about his space views.
"Now, Tim.  Tell me exactly why you want to get off this planet."
Leary: "Why do I want to get off this planet?!?"  Leary told the story
better, and who knows how apocryphal it is.  But it certainly sounds
like Sagan.  And like Leary.