I remember the night I first realized I would die. It was winter in the early ’90s, I was 7 or 8, and I laid on my guard-railed bed pestering my parents with direct questions about how long humans lived. Eventually one of them cracked and explained the difference between “a really long time” and “forever.”

I had wanted them to assure me that humans lived on and on and on, but I guess I’d already sort of sussed out that this couldn’t be the case. Before things got too horrific, they shut off the light and went downstairs, and I lay in bed wondering what the world would be like without me in it, and what thoughts would race through my head in my last moments of consciousness as I realized I was dying: my mind and soul catapulting down a dark elevator shaft, or perhaps swirling in the toilet bowl of infinity. I had circles under my eyes at school the next day. For the remainder of the week, I was like a goyish female Alvie Singer. There was little mirth in my four square-playing or crustless sandwich-inhaling. But as with most things relating to youth, this despair eventually subsided, and I was able to adopt that blithe forgetfulness about my own mortality—at least until many years later, when I first got The Fear.

What is The Fear? Besides the obvious (it’s fear!), it’s the sensation you get when you smoke too much weed and become ensnared in a vivarium of freakish, circus-like physiological symptoms that paint messages on the glass walls of your consciousness, proclaiming: YOU ARE CERTAINLY GOING TO DIE, EITHER SOON OR RIGHT NOW. When I first experienced The Fear, I got hooked on the idea that my body had become like the bus in Speed. As I hyperventilated on the floor, all I could picture was my body as a rickety service vehicle, my heart as a bomb, and no Keanu to tell my brain that the pot crop had not, in fact, been sprayed with rat poison. I threw up. I cried. Later, there was no question that my symptoms were mental as opposed to physical. In actuality, I was lying on my floor shaking a soda bottle of panic inside an otherwise functional corpus.

A smoker learns to combat The Fear with an ever-growing weed crisis toolbox: Statistics that say it’s nearly impossible to die from smoking too much Grape Ape; the power of a warm bath; an extra-large pizza followed by an emergency bedtime. But The Fear can teach you two valuable lessons. The first is that one can get better at being stoned, more in control and self-aware, and triumph over The Fear with practice. The second is that, for better or worse, marijuana simultaneously enhances sensory perception and unlocks a door to a highly imaginative, vivid mental space. Your relationship to your body and your surroundings becomes so different that it can be frightening. With time, you can learn to Photoshop your fright into some close neighbor of enlightenment.

I wanted to figure out exactly what marijuana does to the brain to make your living room into Super Mario World, but that’s not as easy as it sounds—especially since I got a C in high school biology. So I got in touch with Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a marijuana luminary of sorts and retired associate professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School. He didn’t just write the book on pot (Marihuana Reconsidered, 1971), he wrote several. He was buddies with Carl Sagan and regrets misplacing the note from John Lennon he received after serving as an expert witness in his deportation hearing. At 83 years old, he is the coolest person I have talked to on the phone since I conference-called myself while astral traveling.

Given my particular history with the drug, I was especially interested in asking Grinspoon how pot makes our brains into crazy-scheme assembly lines. Grinspoon attributes this phenomenon to what he calls “enhancement” of human capacities. Two of these—sex and eating—are actually vital to our survival. Grinspoon claims that the degree of enhancement varies with the user (but, as with combating The Fear, can get better with practice). In his online collection of essays, Marijuana Uses, Grinspoon writes about the first time he felt the positive effects of smoking weed:

The first thing I noticed, within a few minutes of smoking, was the music; it was “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” … I told John [Lennon] of this experience and how cannabis appeared to make it possible for me to “hear” his music for the first time in much the same way that Allen Ginsberg reported that he had “seen” Cézanne for the first time when he purposely smoked cannabis before setting out for the Museum of Modern Art. John was quick to reply that I had experienced only one facet of what marijuana could do for music, that he thought it could be very helpful for composing and making music as well as listening to it.

So how come, asks the C-average biology student, we don’t know exactly why the brain reacts that way to an ill blunt, yo? The endocannabinoid system, a crew of lipids and receptors that play roles in appetite, pain sensation and mood, is widespread throughout the brain. There’s a lot to explore, from the prefrontal cortex (birthplace of your ideas for creative nachos) to the stodgy old hypothalamus (which tells you when you’ve hadenough of those nachos). “How are we going to understand this scientifically? We’re going to find out what parts of the brain it affects,” says Grinspoon. But more scientific investment, like the studies being conducted abroad to discover how marijuana can treat Crohn’s disease and Parkinson’s, needs to come first.

So we shook our heads over the phone at the fact that there is simply not enough research to satisfy my curiosity of how to isolate the brilliant-idea effects of marijuana and silence the region that tells me to instead watch the Morgan Freeman parallel universe special again.

Had I not been busy barfing my brains out when I got The Fear, I might have reflected on The White Album. It was the backmasking of my own stoned imagination—the track that whispered “Tess is dead man, miss her, miss her” when played backwards, an almost imperceptible suggestion as I roamed the merry streets of Providence, ignoring my heartbeat. Marijuana unlocks some pretty crazy neurological doors, hidden hallways that riddle your brain. And yet a comprehensive answer to what it does, and could possibly do, is still eerily elusive. Just as you can’t unhear backmasking, visiting the strange land of the neurotransmitter anandomide or wading across the delicious fried egg geyser of your brain on drugs leaves you with a great slideshow to play when you’re sober.

“When I make a serious decision about something, I always like to think about it two ways: stoned and straight,” Grinspoon says. “Straight has the final say. But my straight self is able to encompass what I’ve explored while I was stoned, and to judge it by a straight scale, so to speak.”

My experience of thinking about my own death as a child wasn’t so different from my college experience of believing I would die wearing dirty pajamas from a rat-poisoned dime bag. But for some reason, the latter freakout gave me some comfort in retrospect. I felt as though I’d faced a years-incubated fear in some hidden neural cul-de-sac, battled it like a fanged dragon, and passed out in a victorious heap while listening to Dick’s Picks. It was an illusion, of course, but that’s the thing about the human brain: There’s something hyperreal about what goes on in there, especially when it’s all lit up with cheeba neon.

Stoners will not all write “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.” The grandparents among us might not even enjoy listening to it. But we could become closer friends with a different side of our brains, and a different side of ourselves.

Marijuana is currently regulated by the United States government as a Schedule I drug, placing it in the same category as heroin, MDMA and LSD. This is largely due to the first condition of Schedule I drugs, which is that the substance “has a high potential for abuse.” The language in that clause is deliberately vague. Does abuse equal addiction? Probably not, since marijuana is not addictive like other Schedule I drugs. Rats don’t self-administer the compound in a lab, it’s virtually impossible to fatally overdose on the drug, and the physiological effects of marijuana withdrawal, if they occur, are far milder than those experienced by chronic amphetamine, alcohol, nicotine or opiate users. Put another way, if “abuse” means “addiction” then cigarettes should be Schedule I, not marijuana.

Rather, the case for marijuana “abuse” has always stemmed from its cognitive effects. While cigarettes are like caffeinated smoke — they increase attention and productivity, marijuana is the drug of choice for slackers, hippies and Seth Rogen characters. In popular culture, all it takes is one hit from a bong before people become ridiculously dumb, unable to solve the simplest problems or utter a coherent sentence. Potheads eat a lot and laugh at stupid jokes. The larger worry, of course, is that such damage is enduring and that “smoking dope” permanently impedes learning and memory.

That, at least, has been the collective stereotype for decades. There’s even been some science to back it up, especially when the marijuana use begins at an early age. But now a different answer is beginning to emerge, thanks to an authoritative new study led by Robert Tait at the Australian National University. The scientists looked at the long-term cognitive effects of marijuana use in nearly 2,000 subjects between the ages of 20 and 24. The subjects were divided (based on self-reports) into several different categories, from total abstainers (n = 420) to “current light users” (n = 71) to “former heavy users” (n = 60). Over the course of eight years, the scientists gave the subjects a battery of standard cognitive tests, most of which focused on working memory, verbal memory and intelligence. One of the important advantages of this study is that the scientists controlled for a number of relevant variables, such as education and gender. In Time, Maia Szalavitz explains why this statistical adjustment is necessary:

The lower education levels of the pot smokers — and their greater likelihood of being male — had made it look like marijuana had significantly affected their intelligence. In fact, men simply tend to do worse than women on tests of verbal intelligence, while women generally underperform on math tests. The relative weighting of the tests made the impact of pot look worse than it was.

Once these population differences were corrected for, the long-term effects of marijuana use disappeared: The scientists found that “there were no significant between group differences.” In other words, the amount of pot consumed had no measurable impact on cognitive performance. The sole exception was performance on a test of short-term verbal memory, in which “current heavy users” performed slightly worse than former users. The researchers conclude that, contrary to earlier findings, the mind altering properties of marijuana are ephemeral and fleeting:

The adverse impacts of cannabis use on cognitive functions either appear to be related to pre-existing factors or are reversible in this community cohort even after potentially extended periods of use. These findings may be useful in motivating individuals to lower cannabis use, even after an extensive history of heavy intake.

This study builds on previous work by Harvard researchers demonstrating that the learning and memory impairments of heavy marijuana users typically vanish within 28 days of “smoking cessation.” (The slight impairments still existed, however, one week after smoking.) While several days might sound like a long hippocampal hangover, heavy alcohol users typically experience deficits that persist for several months, if not years. In other words, heavy marijuana use appears to be a lot less damaging than alcoholism.

Taken together, these studies demonstrate that popular stereotypes of marijuana users are unfair and untrue. While it’s definitely not a good idea to perform a cognitively demanding task (such as driving!) while stoned, smoking a joint probably also won’t lead to any measurable long-term deficits. The Dude, in other words, wasn’t dumb because he inhaled. He was dumb because he was The Dude. (All those White Russians probably didn’t help, either.)

Furthermore, there’s some intriguing evidence that marijuana can actually improve performance on some mental tests. A recent paper by scientists at University College, London looked at a phenomenon called semantic priming. This occurs when the activation of one word allows us to react more quickly to related words. For instance, the word “dog” might lead to decreased reaction times for “cat,” “pet” and “Lassie,” but won’t alter how quickly we react to “chair.”

Interestingly, the scientists found that marijuana seems to induce a state of hyper-priming, in which the reach of semantic priming extends to distantly related concepts. As a result, we hear “dog” and think of nouns that, in more sober circumstances, would seem rather disconnected, such as “leash” or “hair.” This state of hyper-priming helps explain why cannabis has been so often used as a creative fuel, as it seems to make the brain better at detecting those remote associations that lead to radically new ideas.

Why does marijuana increase access to far reaching intellectual connections? One possibility is that the beneficial effect of the drug is mediated by mood. Marijuana, after all, has long been used to quiet anxious nerves — big pharma is currently exploring targeted versions of THC as a next generation anxiolytic — as only a few puffs seem to dramatically increase feelings of relaxation and euphoria. (The technical term for this, of course, is getting stoned.) Furthermore, recent research has suggested that performance on various tests of remote associations and divergent thinking — a hallmark of creativity — are dramatically enhanced by such positive moods. Look, for instance, at a 2003 study by German researchers that investigated performance on a classic remote associate test (RAT), in which subjects have to find a fourth word that is associated with the three following words:

cottage Swiss cake

This answer is pretty obvious: cheese. But what about this problem?

dream ball book

That was a trick question: There is no shared association. Here’s the remarkable thing about these remote associate problems: People can recognize the possibility of a solution before they’ve solved the problem. The German scientists demonstrated this by asking people to quickly press the spacebar whenever they were presented with a triad that had an answer. If people had no intuitions about creative associations, their guesses should have been roughly random. But that’s not what the scientists found. Instead, subjects were able to efficiently sort “coherent” word problems — those with an actual answer — from incoherent problems, which are a waste of time. Before we find the solution, we can feel its presence.

And this returns us to marijuana: Putting people in a positive mood roughly doubled their accuracy at the task. All of a sudden, they were twice as good at identifying problems with possible solutions. This suggests that anything that makes us happier, reducing vigilance and anxiety, might also make us more creative. We can detect more remote associations, of course, but we also know which associations are worth pursuing, which is probably even more important. It doesn’t matter if it’s pot, chocolate or a stand-up comic — those substances or experiences that put a smile on our face can also increase the powers of the imagination, at least when solving particular creative problems.

So here’s the very un-D.A.R.E. takeaway: Heavy marijuana use doesn’t seem to cause any sort of lasting brain damage. All the negative side-effects are relatively temporary. (But those side-effects are real.) Furthermore, the sort of anxiolytic giddiness triggered by THC comes with its own unexpected benefits, which is probably why humans have been self-medicating with cannabis for thousands of years.

Branson B. has provided rap’s royalty with fine champagne. Now he’s trying to make his own brand of bubbly pop in a crowded marketplace.

On a ragged stretch of sidewalk in northwest Harlem across the street from a dingy bodega, a weathered wooden door separates the outside world from an oenophiles’ wonderland. A homemade bar dominates the room, backed by walls plastered with cutouts from wine publications. Empty bottles of Nicolas Feuillatte, Armand de Brignac and Cristal loom like a hunter’s trophies along the shelves.

On a torpid summer evening, Branson Belchie—better known as Branson B., hip-hop’s unofficial sommelier—hovers behind the bar in search of an acceptable champagne, every move punctuated by a slight flutter of his dreadlocks. Life is too short to struggle through a bad bottle of bubbly.

“I never particularly cared for Moet, personally,” Branson offers. “Moet has a tendency to give me a headache. Back in the day, we drank Clicquot. I turned a lot of people on to Clicquot.” He lowers his voice. “At the time, Clicquot was really good.”

Branson is the man who introduced Cristal, Dom Perignon and a number of other pricey brands to his friends Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace and Sean “Diddy” Combs in the late 1980s. Within a few years, that suggestion sprouted into hip-hop’s full-fledged obsession with champagne. Branson is widely credited with starting the craze, and his name has been mentioned in more than 60 songs over the past two decades.

A self-described street entrepreneur, Branson, 52, got involved in the entertainment business during the early 1990s, serving as road manager for R&B singer Chris Williams and DeVante Swing of Jodeci. He also did consulting work for a number of other artists, and later for the producers of the film American Gangster. As Branson’s career blossomed, so did his taste in champagne. He bought Biggie a six-liter bottle of Taittinger brut one year for the rapper’s birthday; on another occasion, he provided bottles of Cristal and Dom Perignon to singers Faith Evans and Luther Vandross.

“You bust a bottle, pour a couple glasses, and just sip on it as they engage in the creative process,” says Branson. “Sometimes people acquire a taste for one or the other. Like, ‘Yo, I really like that Cristal.’ You go back through there, they’ve got their own bottle of Cristal and they’re offering you a drink now.”

(Editor’s note: You can read the rest of the article here. It’s kind of a silly article, primarily because it makes no mention of the epic amounts of weed this guy moved uptown…as if he became famous simply by recommending liquors to rappers lol.)