As American as Baseball and Apple Pie
To my mother, marijuana prohibition is as American as apple pie—and using marijuana is plain un-American.
She was born in 1937, among that first generation of Americans who would never know a time when cannabis was legal. In school, she was indoctrinated in the belief that a single hit of pot—just one toke—could cause madness, suicide or murder. She was raised on that message of fear, and as a parent she tried desperately to instill that fear in her children.
Mom’s views on marijuana have relaxed somewhat in recent years. She now knows for a fact that a single toke of marijuana won’t kill you—if it did, all of her children would be dead by now. And she learned from her two ex-husbands that cannabis doesn’t cause violence or criminal behavior—no, that would be alcohol. But she still doesn’t like it. While she’s at least willing to accept that some people might need cannabis for medicinal reasons, she insists the drug needs to be tightly regulated, like toxic waste, or terrible things might happen.
If the polls are to be believed, this is how most Americans view cannabis. We tolerate its use for medical reasons, but grudgingly so, and we worry that giving in just this much to the “pot people” might have terrible and unforeseen consequences. We don’t think much about why we feel this way. It’s just how things are. Cannabis has been illegal in the U.S. for so long that its illegality has become part of the cultural landscape—part of the American way of doing things. Marijuana is illegal because it’s bad for you, and it’s bad for you because it’s illegal. It’s what our parents taught us.
That so many have come to see cannabis use as contrary to the American Way is bizarre in the extreme, because America might not exist as a nation without it. Cannabis built this country, or at least a good part of its foundations.
Cannabis was an important part of everyday life for America’s first inhabitants, who used it as a fiber and food, as a medicine and in ritual. When the Europeans arrived, they arrived on ships propelled by hemp sails rigged with hemp rope. When the English colonies took hold and thrived, they thrived because hemp cultivation helped make them profitable.
Our very governmental system was born in the smoke-filled salons of Europe, where students of the Enlightenment smoked hashish in pipes and mused freely about the rights of man and the Golden Mean—the Good Life. When those musings were circulated about the Colonies by a newspaperman named Benjamin Franklin, they were circulated on hemp paper, and when a hemp grower named Thomas Jefferson distilled the essence of those musings into a single document, it was on hemp paper that the first draft of the Declaration of Independence was written on.
When this new nation called America was threatened by British troops, a hemp farmer named George Washington defended it with an army he personally raised, armed and fed with profits from the sale of hemp. Historical evidence suggests those profits were enhanced by Washington’s efforts at cross-breeding strains of cannabis to increase their potency.
The freedoms we Americans enjoy today, the essence of what it means to be an American, flow from the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights—themselves drafted on hemp paper and largely written by a lawyer named James Madison, who once said cannabis lent him the inspiration to found a new democracy.
Times change, and with them the prevailing winds of public opinion. But history is etched in stone. We should never forget that, regardless of its legal status today, cannabis is as much a part of the American fabric as democracy itself. It’s as American as baseball and apple pie.
