Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is here for legal weed
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson got real about marijuana during a Facebook Live question session Monday.
The episode of StarTalk with co-host comedian Chuck Nice turned into a conversation about legalizing weed. One viewer asked if Tyson agreed with the late astronomer Carl Sagan that marijuana should be legalized.
Tyson responded rationally as ever, making the argument that other substances, such as alcohol, are legal, so why not weed.
"If you really analyze it, relative to other things that are legal, there’s no reason for it to ever have been made illegal in the system of laws," he said during the show. "Alcohol is legal and it can mess you up way more than smoking a few Js."
"Alcohol is legal and it can mess you up way more than smoking a few Js."
His co-host Nice poked fun at him for his pot lingo. "I can tell you've never smoked weed in your life," he chided.
Tyson countered, "The last time I was like in a cloud of it, thats how people spoke."
He then moved on, naturally, to the similarities of inhaling helium and passing a joint before getting back to more space-oriented questions.
The conversation starts around the 11-minute mark in the video above.
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Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
