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Wow, what a great reference! I used the search engine on the site. Washington almost always refers to hemp along with flax, or as a descriptor, as in hempen reins or cord. He also refers to it as an agricultural commodity. The search engine brings up only 38 mentions.

There is no evidence here that he used hemp, or cannabis, to get high. Separating male and female plants has more to do with breeding and cordage; it is not evidence that he was trying to make more "potent" plants.

On FR a year or so ago there was a proponent of using hemp as a fiber, who brought up Washington's hemp acreage, and strongly made the point that hemp is not MJ and cannot be used to get high!

If he did smoke weed, you'd think he'd have written about it once or twice.

Likewise if his household used cannabis as medicine, it would have been in herbals of the day or stored among his effects, or mentioned in doctor's notes. Laudanum is mentioned, but never cannabis as medicine. At his museum, a medical kit has laudanum and even nux vomica bottles, but no cannabis preps.

It may seem odd to a proponent of cannabis, but it looks like he grew it for fiber and rope and never considered getting high from it, unless he kept it a deep secret, which would be odd for something that would not become illegal for a century or more in the future.

If you can find a validated historical document stating that Washington shared MJ as a drug I'll reconsider There are many references to ale and whisky- he had one of the biggest distilleries in the New World- but to my knowledge never a reference to smoking or eating his hemp crops.

The History of Medical Marijuana

2727 BC First recorded use of cannabis as medicine in Chinese pharmacopoeia. In every part of the world mankind has used cannabis for a wide variety of health problems.

1937 Cannabis withdrawn from the American public against the advice of the medical community. Hemp excluded from "Class II" drugs (having demonstrated medical value) by Nixon administration in 1970. Dispite all evidence to the contrary, hemp was retained as Class I by the Bush administration in 1989.

http://paranoia.lycaeum.org/marijuana/medical/timeline

...In 1762, "Virginia awarded bounties for hempculture and
manufacture, and imposed penalties upon those who did not
produse it."

George Washington was growing hemp at Mount Vernon three years later--presumably for its fiber, though it has been argued that Washington was also concerned to increase the medicinal or intoxicating potency of his marijuana plants.*

The asterisk footnote:* The quality or quantity of marijuana resin (hashish) is enhanced if the male and female plants are separated *before* the females are pollinated. There can be no doubt that Washington separated the males and the females. Two entries in his diary supply the evidence:

May 12-13 1765: "Sowed Hemp at Muddy hole by Swamp."
August 7, 1765: "--began to seperate (sic) the Male from the Female Hemp at Do--rather too late."

The Book of Grass: An Anthology of Indian Hemp_ (1967), says that Washington's August 7 diary entry "clearly indiactes that he was cultivating the plant for medicinal purposes as well for its fiber." [7] He might have separated the males from the females to get better fiber--his phrase "rather too late" suggests that he wanted to complete the separation *before the female plants were fertilized*--and this was a practice related to drug potency rather that to fiber culture.

http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_history2.shtml