Carl Sagan would have loved 2014: commercial space vehicles, an exploding list of exoplanets, and legal weed — gloriously legal weed.

MarijuanaMajority.com founder Tom Angell spent a few days this summer in the Library of Congress researching the iconic American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist and author and has come away with a bounty.

Angell says he found some never-before-released writings on marijuana policy from the author of classics such as ‘Contact’ and the TV show ‘Cosmos’, which is the most widely watched series in the history of American public television.

Many know now the NASA scientist used cannabis to spark creativity, and — as another noted weed-head Steve Jobs said — think differently.

“I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs,” Sagan wrote in 1971, under the name Mr. X.

But there’s more to it. Angell spent days poring over some 600,000 Sagan papers made available at the Library of Congress through funding from TV and film star Seth MacFarlane and Sagan’s widow / collaborator Ann Druyan.The author died of pneumonia in 1996 — the year medical marijuana was first legalized in California – and left four boxes of papers focused on drug policy alone, and they’re full of previously unpublished and unknown Sagan quotes. Sagan was sort of a sleeper agent for legalization while choosing to focus publicly on environmentalism, animal rights and ending nukes.

As a NASA employee, Mr. X felt muzzled by the federal government when it came to talking about weed. So Druyan did the advocacy.

“There’s no question that he wouldn’t have been able to do his work exploring the solar system and searching for life elsewhere if he made as public a stand as I did,” Druyan tells Angell.

Sagan was likely a closeted, near-daily toker. “We smoked the way other American families would have wine with dinner. For us, it was our sacrament. It was something that made a great life sweeter in every possible way,” Druyan reveals.

Medical marijuana also treated Sagan’s lack of appetite and nausea at the end of his life, she said. But Sagan worked amidst the ‘Just Say No’ ‘80s and ‘90s and was sickened by it, Angell reports.

Sagan dubbed the drug war not only “bad civic engineering” but questioned the “very bad science behind prohibition.”

“Is there something intrinsically immoral about feeling good by taking a molecule? Do we ordinarily feel good because our bodies have generated molecules?” Sagan writes. “How much money is spent every year on the planet on illegal drugs?” Sagan writes in another letter to drug policy reformers. “Does the existence of such enormous amounts of money inevitably lead to corruption in police and military enforcement agencies, legislators, intelligence agencies and the Executive branch?” “If the financial rewards from drug dealing are so enormous, will not the suppression of the drug industry in one nation cause it to proliferate in another nation?”

Read more of Sagan’s drug policy correspondence here.