It seem pretty obvious to me that the Founding Fathers were trying to grow a fiber crop. My question is, just when did Europeans become aware that the same plant that people were trying to make rope with could be recreationally smoked? Maybe traders with the Orient were aware of hashish, but that’s somewhat different from stuffing cannibis leaves into a pipe and lighting up. When did “marijuana” as we are now aware of it first come on the radar?
Cecil makes a comment that because Jefferson didn’t patent his invention, he was a socialist. I suspect that ol’ Cecil was just being comically flip, but I will (dourly) note that Jefferson merely declined to make a profit from his invention. When one turns one’s salary – or Obama his Nobel prize money – over to charity, that doesn’t make him a socialist.
Now, if Jefferson lobbied for a law that said that no one could patent an invention – or Obama signed a law that confiscated everyone’s salary (no comments please) – that would be socialism.
I also would be interested in hearing of good ol’ 18th or 19th century American farmers lighting up. Did anyone light up in the 13 colonies? What is the earliest instance recorded?
To be good for smoking, hemp has to be high in THC. Industrial hemp grown today is low in THC, and is absolute crap for smoking. and there is no evidence that the hemp grown in the United States in colonial times was any different.
Europeans first encountered varieties of hemp that were higher in THC during the Age of Exploration, when they began visiting the East. These were occasionally imbibed in Europe and the Americas in the form of hashish.
The drug didn’t earn widespread attention, however, (in the US) until the early 1900’s. High-THC hemp was also grown in Mexico, and called marijuana and smoked, and there was a wave of Mexican immigration to the Southwest during the civil war in Mexico between 1910 and 1930. The immigrants brought marijuana with them.
I thought marijuana was hemp with more THC in it. Biologically they may be the same plant, but can you get high off hemp? I’ve always heard the answer is “no”.
The column didn’t answer the burning question (hee hee) of whether it was commonly known to be smokable in the Colonial US at that time. Are there known instances of people in the US getting high off marijuana in colonial times? My take on it is, if people back then knew it would get you high, you’d probably find at least a few instances of hemp farmers getting their buzz on. Probably including our founding fathers. They may have viewed it as sort of a stronger version of tobacco. Or was it used exclusively for clothing and fiber back then?
Finally, would it have been rolled in some type of leaf or paper, or puffed in a pipe?
Hemp was first recognized in literature, as far as I have found, as being a “drug” in the 1850 United States Pharmacopaeia. In 1851 the United States Dispensatory noted that extract of hemp was “a powerful narcotic” and reported that it could, among many other things, invoke “delirious hallucinations.” Benet in “Cannabis and Culture” noted that hemp was used as a folk medicine in Eastern Europe, and the wave of immigrants in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s saw its not infrequent use as a medicine - an example is given where hemp is heated on a radiator with a towel covering it, to make a fume chamber.
The first report in the literature of someone in the US purposefully using hemp as a recreational drug (in this case, extract of hemp, rather than smoking) which I’ve found is from a man named Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who wrote about his experience in 1855.
In 1860 Mordecai Cook noted in The Seven Sisters of Sleep that “young America” was starting to use “the bang”, which was a mixture of hemp and betel rolled up into a “quid” like tobacco. In 1876 hashish smoking was featured in the Philadelphia Exposition, and by the mid-1880’s hashish smoking clubs started to be known in New York city. From there on we also have reports of use in and near the border of Mexico, and things sort of take off from there.
Primary source: Sloman, Larry. Reefer Madness: A History of Marijuana New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.
Now this baffles me. If I have to believe that no one then and there got high, then I’ll reluctantly believe it: in the end, observations trump theory and I’m completely a priori here. But come on! As Jared Diamond pointed out with his mushroom story at the beginning of Guns, Germs, and Steel, people who live close to the land are experts on the local plants and animals. And these were farmers. Their crops were their livelihood. Colonial Americans were the ones who invented applejack. You know how you make applejack? You put a barrel of apple cider in your barn in September, and let it freeze every night and partly thaw every day, and come February you tap it and drink the liquid that drains out of the slush. How desperate for a buzz must have been that first person who tried drinking from that last barrel of what was once hard cider? That’s someone who’d sniff cat butts a la “South Park” if he though it would get him high.
Marijuana is no better as fiber than hemp is for smoking, but as Apocalypso pointed out, they’re the same species. No one cut down that runty, mutant hemp pant, and threw the useless thing on his campfire? No one?
It is very possible that people used or tried to use/smoke hemp as a drug, even in the time of Jefferson and Washington in America. All I’m saying is that the literature seems to be incredibly sparse on its use in that manner, and so it makes it unlikely, if not highly unlikely, that the founding fathers would have used it such. Not impossible, but unlikely.
A poodle and a Great Dane are the same species, too. Just because they’re the same species doesn’t mean both get you high.
Sure someone did, and nothing happened, because the hemp they were growing didn’t have much THC. How do I know that? Because nobody ever reported getting high off of it.
This whole topic grinds my gears because it plays into the hands of anti-hemp nincompoops who think that industrial hemp and tokable marijuana are “all the same stuff”. They aren’t.
First off I think there should be one clarification about how THC is produced in a Cannabis plant… All plants, even industrial males, produce some amount of THC… the males of some strains produce enough THC to make them usable in Hashish production or even just regular smoking after drying…
Yes the Females produce the most THC, but not just any females… the females that are kept from pollinating… Large amounts of THC is present in the Resin created by a flowering female plant… The plants create the resin so that the proper surface areas remain sticky and any passing pollen will attach itself and create seed sacks… once the plant is fertilized it stops producing the THC resin… So the strongest plants containing the most THC are the plants that are never fertilized with a male plant’s pollen, which BTW is called Sinsemilla…
But taking the above into light… I think that Washington must have been separating the males and females to produce sinsemilla for smoking… there is no other reason to separate them… if you were going to allow the females to seed you would allow them to stay amongst the males until they pollinated and then just remove them once the seed was produced… the only logical reason to separate them is to delay pollination and produce high % THC plants for smoking…
Here is another wiki link about the usage of cannabis as a drug… I have been trying to find an article I read about an Israeli archeological dig where they discovered some 5000 year old marijuana in a tomb… there is a funny part about how they performed “field tests” and determined that the marijuana was still potent… I wonder what the “field test” was… I sure a more dedicated google researcher could find it… but… well honestly… I’m a little baked right now so I dont really care all that much… lolololololololololollll…
I’m sorry, but I don’t believe this. First, Cecil himself gives a perfectly plausible alternate explanation for separating the males and females. Second, nobody at the time ever wrote about smoking hemp, which they surely would have done if they were getting high. (There are copious contemporary accounts of alcohol and tobacco use, and copious accounts of opium, laudanum, morphine, and hashish usage after these drugs became available and popular in the Nineteenth Century.)
It’s possible. (Hemp, that is, not poodles.) It just, for the reasons I stated, seems wildly unlikely, like getting hit by a meteorite. I understand that’s happened to someone too.
I helped out with this column by looking through literature for cases where recreational use was reported in the United States, as well as reading very large portions of Jefferson’s agricultural writings. What I wrote above looks impressive but it’s largely summarizing from just a couple of sources.
I help out with a lot of research, including mailing an awful lot of people who never write back, making calls, and on a few occasions I’ve done home experiments. Sometimes I get mentioned in the column.
There would appear to be at least two sub-species of cannabis sativa, one for high THC content ‘indicacannabis’ and one, much lower in THC content but with far superior fiber quality ‘sativa’ (yes, canibis sativa sativa).
From Wikipedia (including pictures):
Cannabis sativa L. subsp. sativa var. sativa is the variety grown for industrial use in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere, while C. sativa subsp. indicacannabis generally has poor fiber quality and is primarily used for production of recreational and medicinal drugs. The major difference between the two types of plants is the appearance and the amount of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) secreted in a resinous mixture by epidermal hairs called glandular trichomes, although they can also be distinguished by genetic means.[11] Strains of Cannabis approved for industrial hemp production produce only minute amounts of this psychoactive drug, not enough for any physical or psychological effects. Typically, hemp contains below 0.3% THC, while Cannabis grown for marijuana can contain anywhere from 6 or 7 % to 20% or even more.[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp
(I looked for hemp, rather than marijuana)
The pictures of the two plants are quite distinctive, too. Hemp is much taller whereas marijuana is shorter and bushier.
[FWIW TySticks were quite popular as one of the most potent forms of the weed and it had seeds aplenty!]
Seeing as the Founding Fathers were having a hard time with their hemp-fiber quality, perhaps they were using the wrong sub-species? Just a thought, cause hemp, as such, grows just fine in the latitude they lived in.
Decades ago I read a book, Where Did you Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing., which was a nostalgic look back on the author’s childhood and adventures he had as a boy. Instead of smoking the traditional cornsilk his gang smoked ‘scribblage’ – a weed they found growing wild and dried. Years later as an adult he was travelling down a lane in Kentucky with a local inhabitant and there growing by the side of the road was scribblage. "What’s that? he asked. “Oh that’s wild marijuana,” was the reply. Since the book was printed in 1957 . . . :eek: He didn’t recall getting any kind of a buzz off of it so likely it was the hemp variety.
Yes but Cecil’s explanation was made with a rudimentary knowledge of the subject and he probably doesn’t know too much about the specifics of Sinsemilla production…
Look at the quote from the diary:
“Began to separate the Male from the Female hemp … rather too late.”
Two things are important in that quote… “separate” and “too late”…
Cecil gives two “non-smoking” explanations about the presence/separation of the sexes… To create seed for subsequent crops and to separate the inferior female fibers from the male… If that was what Washington was doing with the Females there would be no “too late”… once the seed was set the plants would be removed… also IMO the word separate does not imply removal and destruction, but rather moving the plants to a different area for continued growth…
I am only looking at the one line quote… but the term too late certainly indicates that he intended to delay pollination… It would be interesting to look at the entire diary to determine at what point of the growth stage the entry occurred… but judging by the date Aug. 7th… it is after the Solstice and during the time that the dark/light cycles are coming to equilibrium, which is when flowering begins… so ya Aug. 7th might have been a little too late for George to get those females out of there, lest their innocence be violated…
Well the vast majority of Cannabis using cultures at this point were not yet literate… so you wouldn’t expect to see much literature on the subject… absolutely only the heppest cats around like Washington and Jefferson are gonna be wise to it… but you are not far from the time that drugs start finding their way into western Caucasian literature… This is about the time Coleridge is born and Kubla Khan is only a few decades off… The Washington and Jefferson crowd, who according to the language of the article was a mix of Libertarians and Socialists (like the beats would be a few centuries later), was at the cutting edge of integrating with the “colored” peoples…
And one final strong point that really cant be argued… Washington liked a good strong Buzz… I don’t think he would have had much of a moral dilemma about smoking a plant that grew on his farm if he could get ripped off it…
Cannabis Ruderalis is a subspecies of Cannabis Sativa. The term was originally used in the former Soviet Union to describe the varieties of hemp that had escaped cultivation and adapted to the surrounding region.
Similar Ruderalis populations can be found in most of the areas where hemp cultivation was once prevalent. The most notable region in North America is the midwest, though populations occur sporadically throughout the United States and Canada. Without the human hand aiding in selection, these plants have lost many of the traits they were originally selected for, and have acclimatized to their locale.
Though they contain little THC, these plants hold large potential for use in breeding, both in hemp and marijuana applications. Early flowering and resistance to locally significant insect and disease pressures are but a few of the important traits present in these feral populations.
Thankfully, despite years of US government sponsored eradication programs, these wild plants still remain in bountiful abundance.
Except that two days later Washington writes "Abt. 6 o’clock put some Hemp in the Rvr. to Rot - ", which at the time was referring to water-rotting, which is a technique of soaking the hemp in water to dissolve and putrefy the gum, to separate the fibers from the interior and the outer bark. Further, in September, he writes that he “Began to pull the Seed Hemp…” the implication being that he had some hemp for fiber use, some for the next year’s seed. Hemp in Virginia at the time was said to be best for use for fiber about July, if sown in April (as typically done), as it had a growing period of 13 to 15 weeks from sowing. It could however be harvested until October.
And yet in the thousands of pages of diaries and notes about gardening, agriculture (including tobacco production and use), etc. there is not one reference of either Washington nor Jefferson talking about, referring to, or implying that they were smoking the hemp.
If true (which I do not admit), then their silence on the smoking or other use of hemp for recreation is baffling, if not damning, to the argument that they smoked the hemp.
Should I ask for a cite about Washington “like(ing) a good Buzz”, or should I just give up at this point?
Here’s another source of interest, from which I take the references for contemporary hemp production: Herndon, G. Melvin. “Hemp in Colonial Virginia” Agricultural History 37.2 (1963): 86-93. See also my prior reference in this thread. You might also read Betts, Edwin Morris (ed.) Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book Redmond, Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Inc. 1999. These are all referenced in Cecil’s column at the end, FTR.
As a general sidebar, in helping to research this column I found it almost a point of ironic despair that most all of the same websites, blogs, and whatever dedicated to showing how useful hemp could be for everything except smoking (you can like, make clothes, and paper, and, um, hovercrafts out of it) go out of their way to claim without strong evidence that two of the early backers of hemp as a non-drug must have been smoking it to get high.
