George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew cannabis on their plantations. Jefferson,while envoy to France, went to great expense—and even considerable risk to himself and his secret agents—to procure particularly good hempseeds smuggled illegally into Turkey from China. The Chinese Mandarins (political rulers) so valued their hemp seeds that they made their exportation a capital offense.

    Diaries of George Washington; Writings of George Washington, Letter to Dr. James Anderson, May 26, 1794, vol 33, p. 433, (U.S. govt. pub., 191); Letters to his caretaker, William Pearce, 1795 & 1796; Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson’s Farm Books; Abel, Ernest, Marijuana: The First 12,000 Years, Plenum Press, NY, 1980; M. Aldrich, et al.

    The United States Census of 1850 counted 8,327 hemp “plantations”^* (minimum 2,000 acre farms) growing cannabis hemp for cloth, canvas, and even the cordage used for baling cotton. Most of these plantations were located in the South or in the border states, primarily because of the cheap slave labor available prior to 1865 for the labor-intensive hemp industry.

    (U.S. Census, 1850; Allen, James Lane, The Reign of Law, A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields, MacMillan Co., NY, 1900; Roffman, Roger, Ph.D., Marijuana as Medicine, Mendrone Books, WA, 1982.)

    * This figure does not include the tens of thousands of smaller farms growing cannabis, nor the hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of family hemp patches in America; nor does it take into account that 80% of America’s hemp consumption for 200 years still had to be imported from Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland well into this century.

    Benjamin Franklin started one of America’s first paper mills with cannabis. This allowed America to have a free colonial press without having to beg or justify paper and books from England.