Weren’t Jefferson and Washington inveterate potheads? Smoking the rope?
Smoking tobacco was totally fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it was learned from the Native American tribes who used it for that purpose. Nicotine, in decent concentrations as a solution is a strong and effective pesticide. But now they’ve illegalized nicotine in favor of other synthetics, in fact, had we used nicotine solution instead of DDT, we would have seen a vastly different world. But here’s the problem, all that plenty of people can see in tobacco is smoking the cigarette, very narrow minded. With hemp, which is similar but not even identical to marijuana, people did derive clothing and rope fibers from it, people derived cooking oil from hemp as well. Yes, it was grown for fiber and cooking oil (hemp, anyways, by George Washington on his plantation. Even with marijuana, well, you can also derive fibers from the stuff, make some tea with it, make cooking oil with it, and so on. But the DEA is so narrow-minded as to figure, hey, let’s illegalize it to protect people from smoking it, when the real practical solution for a substance is to actually make note of the substance, note the side effects, and leave people to it, and the consequences of what they do with it. But that’s the real problem, no one wants to take the consequences of foolishness either. I’m all for ending the narrowmindedness, bring back nicotine as an organic pesticide, and just redo all the drug laws entirely.