Founding Fathers on Hemp

Before cannabis was made illegal in 1937, many Americans, including some of our founding fathers, grew hemp for a variety of reasons. It's uses have been well known across many different cultures for thousands of years. Although it is debatable as to whether any of the founders actually smoked marijuana, it is historical fact that they regularly grew hemp for its wide industrial utility.

GEORGE WASHINGTON           

                                                                "Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere."

-George Washington 

"What was done with the seed saved from the India Hemp last summer? It ought, all of it,

to have been sewn again; that not only a stock of seed sufficient for my own purposes might have been raised,

but to have disseminated the seed to others; as it is more valuable than the common Hemp."
George Washington
Writings of Washington, Vol. 35, pg. 72

Washington was a well known hemp farmer and proponent of the benefits of growing hemp. He cultivated Indian hemp for industrial reasons, and anecdotal evidence suggests he may have smoked cannabis to relief constant toothaches. (Washington lost all his teeth by age 53.) According to his diary entry on August 7, 1765: "we began to separate the male from the female hemp plants.”

Many interpret this quote as proof that Washington was separating the two in order to produce a more potent crop for smoking. As President, George Washington wrote a letter to a friend that contains what may be a reference to hashish: "The artificial preparation of hemp, from Silesia, is really a curiosity."

THOMAS JEFFFERSON

"Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country."
- Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President quote on Hemp

"If people let government decide which foods they eat and medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny."
-Thomas Jefferson

"An acre of the best ground for hemp, is to be selected and sewn in hemp and be kept for a permanent hemp patch." - Thomas Jefferson's Garden book

"The culture [of tobacco] is pernicious. This plant greatly exhausts the soil. Of course, it requires much manure, therefore other productions are deprived of manure, yielding no nourishment for cattle, there is no return for the manure expended... It is impolitic... The fact well established in the system of agriculture is that the best hemp and the best tobacco grow on the same kind of soil. The former article is of the first necessity to the commerce and marine, in other words to the wealth and protection of the country. "
-- Thomas Jefferson
Farm Journal (March 16, 1791)

Jefferson disliked tobacco, as he explained in his Farm Journal (16 March 1791):

"The culture [of tobacco] is pernicious. This plant greatly exhausts the soil. Of course, it requires much manure, therefore other productions are deprived of manure, yielding no nourishment for cattle, there is no return for the manure expended... It is impolitic... The fact well established in the system of agriculture is that the best hemp and the best tobacco grow on the same kind of soil. The former article is of the first necessity to the commerce and marine, in other words to the wealth and protection of the country. The latter, never useful and sometimes pernicious, derives its estimation from caprice, and its best value from the taxes to which it was formerly exposed..."

Farmer Thomas Jefferson and paper maker Ben Franklin were ambassadors to France during the initial surge of the hashish vogue. Their celebrity status and progressive revolutionary image afforded them ample opportunities to try new experiences. Jefferson smuggled Chinese hemp seeds to America.

JOHN ADAMS

"We shall, by and by, want a world of hemp more for our own consumption." 
 - John Adams