The things I've realized about myself have changed me

    In his book On Being Stoned, Charles Tart quotes the reply of a forty-year-old physicist to his questionnaire, who wrote as follows on the question of stoned insights:

I smoke marijuana once or twice a week for recreation, but a couple of times I've started thinking about my work when stoned and had real breakthroughs as a result. Once, when I had been in the process of setting up a new laboratory for several months, I got stoned one evening and started thinking about things at the lab and suddenly had all these ideas popping into my mind of little things I had to do if the laboratory was to function on schedule, little details about equipment that were unspectacular but essential. I listed about twenty ideas in an hour, and every one of them checked out the next day. They were all sorts of things that had been pushed to the back of my mind by more obvious problems in setting up the laboratory. Another time I got thinking about a problem area in my work, and all sorts of theoretical ideas came popping into my head. They fit together into a coherent theory which looked damned good the next morning—I have since published the theory and organized a lot of research around it, to my great advantage.[16]

    A strikingly similar statement appears in Marihuana Reconsidered. "Mr. X.," we are told, is a leading American scientist, in his early forties when this statement was written:

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....
    I find that most of the insights I achieve while 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.[17]

    Several correspondents provided examples of their own stoned insights, and while they may not be profound, neither are they entirely trivial. Stoned insights tend to fall into one of three categories: first, a deeper recognition or understanding of an already-known truth or perception; second, a new way of looking at something, or a metaphor that renders an abstract idea more complete; and finally, playful fantasies and ideas.
    The first category, deeper recognition of known truths, tends to occur privately to smokers: "I ought to give Henry a call," a smoker who is high may decide for no apparent reason. Playful fantasies and ideas, the third category, tend to be idiosyncratic. "You share heaven with everybody you've ever been in a photograph with," suggests a Los Angeles smoker, who offers this stoned idea as well:

Just as our nerve endings give information to the brain, perhaps every living organism is a nerve ending that tells God—the Central Processing Unit—information about reality. Each of us knows only our own reality, just as each of our nerve endings has a true but limited picture of what is. Presumably, there are things all around us that may be as inaccessible to each of us as emotions are to the tips of our fingers.