Mr. X: How Carl Sagan Wrote the Smartest Cannabis Essay of the 20th Century — Anonymously

In 1971, the Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon published Marihuana Reconsidered — a meticulous, evidence-driven argument that the United States had built its cannabis policy on bad science and worse politics. The book is still readable. It still holds up.

Tucked inside it, under the pseudonym "Mr. X," is one of the most thoughtful pieces of writing about cannabis in the English language. The author describes himself as a successful professional in his forties who began using cannabis in his early thirties. He is careful, methodical, reflective. He talks about how the plant changed his appreciation of art and music. He describes specific experiences — looking at a painting and suddenly understanding the brushwork, listening to a piece of music and hearing structures he had missed for years. He talks about scientific insights that came to him while high and that turned out, on sober review, to be correct.

He also says, plainly, that the laws against cannabis are a moral disgrace.

Who Mr. X Was

Lester Grinspoon kept the secret for almost three decades. The author was Carl Sagan — astronomer, science communicator, Pulitzer winner, the man who introduced a generation of Americans to the cosmos through Cosmos. Sagan was already a public figure when he wrote the essay. He was about to become a much bigger one.

Grinspoon revealed the identity in 1999, three years after Sagan's death, in a piece written for a tribute volume. Sagan's biographer Keay Davidson confirmed it independently. Sagan had used cannabis regularly for most of his adult life. He had told friends that some of his best ideas came on it, including a section of one of his books that he could not have written sober.

Why It Mattered

The essay is short. You can read it in fifteen minutes. What makes it remarkable is not any single argument but the kind of person doing the arguing. Sagan was, by any measure, one of the most credible scientific voices of the postwar United States. He wrote the Mr. X essay during the Nixon administration, at the moment the war on drugs was being institutionalized. The Controlled Substances Act had passed the year before. The DEA was about to be created.

If "Mr. X" had been credited as Carl Sagan, the essay would have been a national event. It would have ended careers — including, possibly, his own. So it was published anonymously, and the most important defense of cannabis written by a major American scientist in the 20th century reached its readers as a footnote in a Harvard Press book.

The Quiet Part

Sagan never publicly recanted. He never wrote about cannabis under his own name. He continued his scientific work, his public communication, and (his friends would later confirm) his use of the plant, until he died of myelodysplasia in 1996 at age 62.

The essay is still in print. It is still anonymous on the cover. The cosmos guy and the plant — wonder is wonder.