“Did George Washington Use Medical Marijuana?”
Before “Choom Gang” Obama or “I didn’t inhale” Clinton, the first president likely smoked pot.
Presidential aspirants smoking pot, states growing hemp for industrial use — 2015 sounds a lot like 1776. In fact, America’s first president may have been one of the nation’s original users of medicinal marijuana.
George Washington’s rotting teeth and the dentures that replaced them—made of hippopotamus ivory, gold springs, and brass screws—caused enormous pain, which some believe he alleviated with weed as evidenced from a passage from one of the president’s letters: “Began to separate the male from female plants rather too late…Pulling up the (male) hemp. Was too late for the blossom hemp by three weeks or a month.”
The implication is that the Father of the Nation was going for female plants with higher THC content. However, it’s most likely that the female plants he refers to were used for seeds to grow more hemp and the male hemp plants were pulled up for fibers….
The men who signed the Charters of Freedom may have taken the edge off the Revolution with the help of drugs, too. Hemp farmer Jefferson and paper maker Benjamin Franklin were ambassadors to France during the initial surge of the hashish vogue.
Thomas Jefferson brought a variety of cannabis seeds from Europe to America at great personal risk, but there is no direct evidence he ever used the ensuing crops for recreational purposes. Benjamin Franklin isn’t known to have smoked weed but he did use laudanum, a mixture of alcohol and opium, to lessen the pain from gout, kidney stones, and other ailments.
James Monroe allegedly began smoking cannabis as Ambassador to France and maintained the habit into old age. Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce and Zachary Taylor are rumored to have smoked with their troops. In one letter to his family, Pierce complained that hemp was ‘about the only good thing’ about the Mexican war. Presidents remained mostly sober from Pierce to Dwight Eisenhower, but John F. Kennedy made up for lost time.
In addition to dozens of painkillers and stimulants, JFK allegedly experimented with marijuana to deal with severe back pain, according to a few written accounts, including John F. Kennedy: A Biography…
There is then another lull, until the political ascendancy of the baby-boom generation, when Mary Jane becomes almost ubiquitous. On the Democratic side, we have Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, John Edwards and Barack Obama. Astonishingly, every Democratic presidential nominee since 1992 is on record as having smoked pot: Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama.
It’s a bipartisan affair, too. George W. Bush admitted to past marijuana use in a recorded interview with a friend. Newt Gingrich told the Wall Street Journal in 1996 he used to toke up. Even Rick Santorum admitted to smoking in college. Ditto, Sarah Palin when marijuana wasn’t illegal in Alaska.
No president was probably as prodigious a marijuana smoker than Obama, who was part of the “Choom Gang” in high school and freely admitted to smoking weed (and using cocaine) in his youth. So, from our first president, growing cannabis and buying replacement teeth from his black slaves, to the current president.