Once and for all - which presidents got stoned?
It is generally known that hemp was a common crop in the early days of the Republic, and that many of the Founding Fathers owned hemp plantations. Once harvested, the hemp was used to make rope and clothing. Benjamin Franklin owned a mill that made hemp paper. The paper on which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written was made from hemp.
Because of this, the question has never gone away: Did the Founding Fathers of the United States of America ever use the stuff “recreationally?” Some researchers think so. A Dr. Burke, president of the American Historical Reference Society and a consultant for the Smithsonian Institute, counted seven early presidents as cannabis smokers: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce. “Early letters from our founding fathers refer to the pleasures of hemp smoking,” said Burke. Pierce, Taylor and Jackson, all military men, smoked it with their troops. Cannabis was twice as popular among American soldiers in the Mexican War as in Vietnam: Pierce wrote to his family that it was “about the only good thing” about that war.
Speaking before the National Commission on marijuana and drug abuse, the Surgeon General quoted Dr. Burke in his testimony. The only problem was, Dr Burke doesn’t actually exist. After a look through the archive, an angry Smithsonian Institute official fired off a letter to the writer of the ‘publication’ that had originally quoted Dr. Burke, saying “Dr. Burke is either an imposter or a figment of your imagination.”
There is a theory that George Washington smoked marijuana to alleviate the pain from his rotting teeth. If so, this would surely have to count as the highest profile use of medicinal-marijuana ever. Believers in the ‘Washington theory’ point to 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 supposed implication is that the Father of the Nation was going for female plants with higher THC content.
Regarding Washington’s letter, 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.
It’s important to note here that the distinction between hemp and marijuana is often overlooked. They are of the same plant family, but hemp does not contain THC (the chemical that gets people high) like marijuana does. Smoking wild hemp is more likely to bring on a wild headache than a wild high. Hemp was easy to grow because it required little water or fertilizer and did not need replanting year after year. The root structure was essential to creating rich soil with lots of aeration. Because it grew quickly, and took hold, it was used for stabilizing soil, which made it ideal for growing all kinds of other plants.
As for the tale about Washington’s teeth? The President’s solution to his dental problems was actually weirdly elaborate. The reason his lips are firmly sealed in every portrait is due to the unflattering reality that his original teeth were pulled out, and replaced with a set of dentures carved out of hippopotamus ivory and employing gold wire springs and brass screws holding a combination of teeth sourced from animals, and purchased from slaves he owned, who were willing to undergo an extraction or two in order to make a little extra pocket money. Whilst the president may not have needed to smoke marijuana medicinally to cope with any ensuing or protracted aches and pains, it’s possible that one or two of his contemporaries might have resorted to the drug as a coping mechanism if they happened to witness the Father of the Nation grinning.
James Monroe allegedly began smoking cannabis as Ambassador to France and maintained the habit into old-age. 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 also escapes scrutiny. To lessen the pain from his gout, kidney stones and other ailments, however, he did turn to laudanum, a mixture of alcohol and opium, and remained an addict until he died at the ripe old age of eighty-four.
For the hundred-years from Franklin Pierce to Dwight Eisenhower, we have almost nothing in the historical record of presidents or prominent figures using cannabis. Pre-Civil War America was a land of hemp farmers and slaves who could commonly roll up some hemp leaf as a smoke. Post-Civil War America heralded the development of pre-rolled tobacco cigarettes and prejudice against the Mexican immigrants who smoked “marihuana”. Cannabis was becoming a patent medicine, so perhaps some presidents used it in that fashion. But by the turn of the 20th century, the temperance movement was in full swing and states were beginning to prohibit cannabis.
It isn’t until Camelot that we find a renewal of references to pot. John F. Kennedy, (in addition to dozens of other pain-killers and stimulants) allegedly experimented with marijuana to deal with severe back pain, according to a few written accounts, including “John F. Kennedy: A Biography”, which described this White House scene: “On the evening of July 16, 1962, according to [Washington Post executive] Jim Truitt, Kennedy and Mary Meyer smoked marijuana together. … The president smoked three of the six joints Mary brought to him. At first he felt no effects. Then he closed his eyes and refused a fourth joint. ‘Suppose the Russians did something now,’ he said.”
This story also seems somewhat apocryphal and ridiculous, given the amount the President is alleged to have imbibed. After three joints, the Commander in Chief would likely have entered into a potentially harrowing and overwhelmed state and been subjected to intense visuals; to the extent that he may even have believed he could see Russia from his house.
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. Apart from Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman, (at least as far as we know) every vice-presidential nominee has too. In other words, we’re coming up on a quarter-of-a-century of Democratic presidents and presidential nominees, and more often than not, both members of Democratic tickets, who enjoyed recreational cannabis during their youth.
On the Republican side, the most notable figure is George W. Bush, who admitted to past marijuana use in a recorded interview with a friend. We also have the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, who, attempting to justify the introduction of a draconian anti-drug policy, despite a history of personal use, reportedly told Wall Street Journal reporter Hilary Stout in 1996, “That was a sign we were alive and in graduate school in that era. See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now, it is illegal and immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality… That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.”
We also have the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who lectured a defendant thus: “I was smart enough to use pot without getting caught, and now I’m on the Supreme Court. If you were stupid enough to get caught, that’s your problem. Your appeal is denied.”
Most interesting, in the modern era, are the prominent social conservatives. Rick Santorum, during an interview on CNN said,
“Well, yeah, I admitted you know, back when I was running for the Senate, that when I was in college that I smoked pot and that was something that I did when I was in college.”
Perhaps most surprisingly, Republican vice-presidential nominee and prominent social conservative Sarah Palin suggested that, relatively speaking, pot is a “minimal problem,” and admitted to smoking marijuana in the past, when pot was legal for personal use in the state of Alaska.
From the Libertarian wing of the Republican Party, there is Rand Paul. There is a strange episode from Paul’s time at Baylor College. One afternoon in 1983 (although memories about all of these events are understandably a bit hazy, so the date might be slightly off), he and a friend paid a visit to a female student who was one of Paul’s teammates on the Baylor swim team. According to this woman, “He and Rand came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.”
This is the dubious story that gave rise to the infamously quirky term ‘Aqua Buddha.’ It is interesting to note that the grown-up Paul, whilst not favoring legalizing marijuana, believes that individual states should be allowed to make marijuana legal. “States should be allowed to make a lot of these decisions. I want things to be decided more at a local basis, with more compassion. I think it would make us as Republicans different.” He also says legal penalties for marijuana should be relaxed. “I think, for example, we should tell young people, I’m not in favor of you smoking pot, but if you get caught smoking pot, I don’t want to put you in jail for 20 years.”
FULL ARTICLE: http://sheppardpost.com/cannabis-and-the-presidency/
