I have heard the rumor that Thomas Jefferson traded marijuana blends with Washington and the other founding fathers. I really find this hard to beleive, but the rumor is ubiquitos.
Can anyone verify if it is true or false?
I have emailed famous Jefferson scholar, Clay JEnkins, but gotten no response. However, on his podcast, “The Thomas Jefferson Hour” he did admit to donning his Thomas Jefferson impersonation gear and visiting Burning Man. Should I take this as a tacit admission to T3P’s smoking habits.
They both grew it. It was used to make sails and rigging for ships. This doesn’t mean that they smoked it. I don’t believe marijuana smoking was widely known or at least not in vogue among Europeans back then. It probably would have been a harsh buzz anyway.
Try Googling for Jefferson+Letters+Hemp and see what you get and form your own opinion. There is no smoking [del]gun[/del] pipe in his letters but it certainly sounds like he was growing the crop for recreational use also.
Can you be more specific? What leads you to believe this? From everything I know, the hemp grown in colonial times would have been absolute crap for smoking, just like industrial hemp today.
I can’t as it has been too long since I read the letters. That is why I suggested finding and reading them as it is a matter of opinion and not fact. I don’t have the inclination to find them again myself. I forget where I read them. As I recall, it sounds like Jefferson who was an amateur scientist was experimenting with different types of hemp though in his agricultural research.
This was the first hitin my Google search and it goes into a lot of letters but I think there was more.
As has been mentioned above, note that hemp != weed as we know it. Consider maple trees. There was a thread a while back about the possibility of getting syrup from non-sugar maples. It’s possible, but it will be just slightly closer to traditional maple syrup than Log Cabin (come to think of it, brown paint is slightly closer to real maple syrup than Log Cabin et al, but work with me here). Same thing with pot – growing for THC potency is different than growing for strong fibers. Not only are the individual strains different, but also how it’s grown and harvested. Some of the things that go into harvesting good bud (e.g., timing) don’t apply and would be contrary to harvesting for good fiber.
Or so I heard.
So even if TJ smoked some of his product, it was’t necessarily due to the buzz – he could just as plausibly have been comparing it to tobacco or other smokeables out there. A mild high may have been somewhere in the mix, but since Dark Side, Animals, and Aoxomoxa wouldn’t be released for almost two hundred years, making the stretch that he smoked pot in the recognizable sense is a bit of a stretch.