A Short History of Hemp

Man's involvement with hemp goes back at least ten thousand years. A smoking pipe was discovered with the hemp leaf logo scratched upon it and carbon dated at ten thousand years old. (See the book "Drugs in History.") That was about the time that Western Civilization arose along the Nile River. I would argue that it is at least possible that hemp was the first agricultural product. Let's speculate for a minute. The settling of hunter/gatherers was in large part do the stabilizing influence of agriculture. (The act of farming compels a tribe or a family to literally and figuratively put down roots.) Instead of following a herd of animals, the farmer has a vested interest in a piece of land. Also, for the first time in history, a relatively small number of people acquired the ability to feed the entire population while other needs arose: building storage facilities, trading commodities, protecting food stores.

What plant would be more suitable to the ancient farmer than hemp? It provided food, clothing, shelter, oil for cooking and lamps. It could provide water-proofing and paper. Also, it's basically a weed that grows wild so primitive men and women had generations to observe the plant doing its own thing and over time, maybe eons, they noticed things; seeds germinating, the fact that the plant did better along rivers and streams than it did in more marginal soils, maybe they noticed that the plant grew faster around animal dung. These are bedrock discoveries that paved the way for agriculture. If this sound too far-fetched, consider that the pygmy tribes of Africa, though still hunter/gatherers themselves, do cultivate one crop - hemp!

Could they be offering clues to us about our past? As long as we're speculating, consider a couple of other interesting facts. One is that it's been reported that the protein, or one of the proteins, in human blood (for more see my Hemp Nutrition page) is almost a carbon copy - pun intended - of the protein in the hemp seed. And secondly, the oil derived from the hemp seed is the most perfect oil for human nutrition having the exact ratio of essential fatty acids for optimum nutrition. As a matter of fact, hemp is the only plant on earth that supplies all three essential fatty acids - 6-Omega, 3-Omega, and Super GLA. If all of this is merely coincidence, it's some coincidence.

The ancients had an affinity to hemp, this much is certain. Traces of THC have been discovered in the hair follicles of mummies that are three to four thousand years old, hemp seeds have been discovered in ancient burial chambers, and when Sinbad the Sailor set out across the sea, his sails, ropes, and sailor suits were made of hemp. (The Arabic word for cannabis is "canvas.") Perhaps the oldest written work in the world, the Bagavaad Gita has a section called the Mahabarata, itself one of the oldest parts of the Bagavaad Gita. In it is related the story of how pilgrims would wander into the mountains to where the sacred river began and at its source, place offerings of Ghanja to the goddess Kali. Ghanja is the name for cannabis in India, and it is why their sacred river is called the Ganges. Tinctures of cannabis were first mentioned in the emperor of China's pharmacopeias over five thousand years ago. Unquestionably, the hemp plant has been in the service of man for a long, long time. Although seldom mentioned, hemp has played a role in many of the episodes where man took strides forward. When the Guttenberg press was invented, the first book published was a Bible and the paper it was printed on was hemp paper. When Columbus sailed the ocean blue, his little caravels carried as much as eighty tons of hempen products.

In colonial America, hemp was an important crop, supplying as it did, medicine, rope, canvas, denim, paint and varnish, oil, and water-proofing. When our founding fathers got around to drafting the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they did it on hemp paper and when Betsy Ross, bless her little pea-pickin' heart, got around to sewing up Old Glory, that's right, she used hemp cloth. George Washington, - remember him? - was an early hemp advocate, extolling as he did the virtues of Indian Hemp and advising American's to grow it in every state. Washington's interest in hemp seems to go beyond the fields of industrial hemp for cordage as a diagram of his vegetable garden showed where his hemp plants were sown. They were grown in a place of honor, right in the middle, and he even had notes referring to the proper time to harvest the males. The dude was growing sensimillia! Historians would have us believe that he used tinctures of cannabis to combat the pain he suffered from his wooden teeth, but in a Christmas card between George and Tommy Jefferson there is a reference to "something for your pipe," so who's to say.

The first law on the books concerning hemp in America, was a law that stated that farmers had to grow hemp! Hemp was such a military necessity (Old Ironsides carried sixty tons of it) that farmers used hemp to pay their taxes. Hemp in fact was called "legal tender," and that is how that phrase entered the lexicon. When the first Diesel engine was produced by Rudolph Diesel, it was designed to run on diesel fuel derived from hemp oil.

This is by no means a definitive history of hemp, it's at best a thumbnail sketch of the role that this marvelous plant has played in the history of mankind. Volumes have been written, and two good ones are The Great Book of Hemp, by Rowan Robinson and The Emperor Has No Clothes, by Jack Herrer. Must reads for anyone interested in the far-reaching world of hemp.

In the late nineteen eighties a colonial era water main was dug up in Providence Rhode Island. It was wood wrapped in hemp and had been carrying water for two-hundred years. This is some amazing plant, and to think that we had politicians that we trusted to protect our best interest that made this plant illegal, makes me want to cry... or puke. But what it really compels me to do is to get involved, in any little that I can, to unmask and reverse what will surely go down as one of the most outrageous scams against planet earth, and the people who live upon it, of all time. Oh, I know I'll be called a "zealot," and the description is aptly applied. I know as a zealot it is easy to fall victim to hyperbole and overstatement, but in this case if I have erred, it is on the conservative side.

When you learn to appreciate just how magnificent this plant is, how integral it was to the development of civilization, and how it could help us create a world of nutritional abundance, non-toxic consumer goods, sustainable forms of energy with long-term advantages to the environment, dwellings that would last for generations and require few if any forest products to build, paper that would last for hundreds of years, be easier to recycle and not require that one tree need be cut.. the list of possibilities is nearly endless. When you realize that many of the products and policies we now take for granted are really toxic and non-sustainable and can be readily replaced by hemp, with the main consequence the rebirth of the American farm, then I think you and others will joining me, and millions of others, in a little old time zeal.

In that great old movie, "Lawrence of Arabia," there's a scene in which Lawrence is trying to convince his friend Ali to cross a desert and attack the town of Aqaba. Lawrence points across the desert and says, "Aqaba is over there, it's only a matter of going." To unseat the ensconced bureaucracy, to remove the laws that have for generations banned hemp, to push the corporate nabobs from their place of prominence will not be easy. The ivory towers from where they rule over us, from where they gerrymander public opinion to suit their own fiscal agendas, from where they lord over the pocket books of the American taxpayer as if they constituted some private piggy-bank from which they fatten their personal wealth with impunity, are not going to topple of their own accord. These ivory towers are well protected and to return this country to a path that reflects the true will of the people and not the will of the corporate few, cleverly masquerading as the will of the people, is not going to be easy. It is in fact, going to be almost impossible, but that is why we are going to rejoice so completely when we do it.

People, a better world is over there. It is only a matter of going. The live's we are living today is tomorrow's history and as long as we're making it, we might as well make a history of which we are proud.