Hidden History of Cannabis Use in America

The first law relating to cannabis in the United States didn’t prohibit the plant or reference the term marijuana. According to Jack Herer, activist and author of “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” a book used in cannabis decriminalization efforts, claims that all farmers at Jamestown Colony in Virginia were ordered to grow Indian hempseed. Additional must-grow laws were later enacted in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Chesapeake Colonies by the mid-1700’s. Surprisingly in the United States Census of 1850 an astonishing 8,327 hemp ‘plantations’ (minimum 2,000-acre farms) were counted in which hemp was grown for cloth, canvas, and even cordage used for baling cotton. 

Figure 1:

The female cannabis plant referred to as marijuana.

Source:

Blozie, Kimberly; "Cannabis/Marijuana cracked

by Medicinal Genomics"; (2012): Web.

In fact, botanically speaking hemp, cannabis, or marijuana is a member of the most advance plant species on Earth. Cannabis is  able to use the sun more efficiently than any other plant, reaching 12 to 20 feet in one, three month growing cycle. Able to grow in the majority of climates and soil conditions, cannabis is one of the most important natural resources to ever be grown on this Earth.  With the wide spread production of hemp through the 1850’s what changed this industrialize, successful crop into a prohibited drug banned from all forms of production? 

Today industrialized hemp remains illegal because of its evil step cousin--marijuana. Our Federal Government even claims that people can’t tell the difference between “marijuana” a term commonly used to refer to the buds of the female plant and the physically different looking male hemp plant. The Federal Government even claims that hemp must remain illegal because officers flying over fields of industrial hemp might confuse it with a field of illegal marijuana. I see a clear difference between Figure 1 and 2 but you can determine for yourself the validity of this statement. Nevertheless both plants remain strictly prohibited and are classified as a Schedule I Narcotic which means that, according to the Federal Government, both forms of cannabis have no recorded medical use.  

Figure 2:

The male cannabis plant referred to as hemp.  

Source:

Krafft, Randy; "Stimulate the U.S. Economy by Legalizing

Industrial Hemp"; (2011): Web

Prohibiting a substance in this manner was warned against by President Lincoln, who’s belief in equal rights can be extended to the use of cannabis. Which can be seen in Lincoln’s response to repressive mentality, “Prohibition...goes beyond the bound of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetitive by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes...A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.” When possession of a plant becomes a criminal offense people generally assume a process involving medical, scientific, and government research was used to determine its removal from society; yet when studying the history of cannabis prohibition another picture emerges filled with racism, fear, yellow journalism, corrupt legislators, and personal greed.