| Photo: Another Godless Goddess |
| Ann Druyan, president, NORML Board of Directors |
Here’s your interesting cannabis fact of the day: Ann Druyan, author, writer, television producer — and widow of astronomy legend Dr. Carl Sagan — was listed as president of the NORML Foundation Board of Directors.
Druyan was co-writer, along with her husband Sagan, of the Emmy and Peabody Award winning television series Cosmos, and served as creative director of the NASA project to design a complex message of music, images and ideas for potential alien civilizations that was placed aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 interstellar spacecraft.
She also wrote and produced the PBS Nova episode “Confession of a Weaponeer,” which covered the life of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s science advisor, George Kistiakowsky.
| Photo: Another Godless Goddess |
| Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan |
More recently, Druyan was the co-writer and co-producer of the movie Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s novel of the same name.
Druyan is the author or co-author of several books, including Comet and, most recently, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.
Her articles have appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Parade, Discover, Explorers Journal, and the Saturday Evening Post.
Druyan is the CEO of Cosmos Studies, Inc. She also directs the New York Children’s Health Fund, a project providing mobile pediatric care to homeless and disadvantaged children in more than a half-dozen cities.
Her husband, Dr. Carl Sagan (1934-1996), wrote an essay as “Mr. X” in 1969 for publication in Dr. Lester Grinspoon’s great book, Marihuana Reconsidered (1971).
“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world,” Sagan wrote in the essay.
He was in his mid-30s at the time. He continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life.
Editor’s note: The info on the NORML Foundation’s website was slightly out of date. NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre told me Tuesday afternoon that Ann Druyan, while no longer president of the NORML Foundation Board, still serves on NORML’s advisory board to this day.