Did George Washington Grow Marijuana?

The Claim

Walk into enough head shops, scroll enough cannabis memes, or read enough legalization op-eds and you will eventually meet the claim: George Washington grew marijuana. Sometimes it's stronger — Washington smoked marijuana, Washington's diary proves he was separating male and female plants to make potent sinsemilla, the Founding Fathers were all stoners, the Declaration of Independence was drafted on hemp paper while everyone was high.

The claim shows up in legalization advocacy, in High Times retrospectives, on t-shirts, and in countless social media posts every April 20th. It is meant to be a rhetorical trump card: if the father of the country grew weed, how can weed be un-American?

It's a fun story. It is also mostly wrong.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

Let's separate the two distinct claims.

Claim 1: Washington grew hemp at Mount Vernon. This is true. Strong evidence Washington's own diaries and farm records document hemp cultivation from at least 1765 onward. Mount Vernon, the official historical estate, openly acknowledges this and even grows demonstration hemp plots today ^[1][2]. Hemp was an ordinary cash and utility crop in colonial Virginia — used for rope, sacking, fishing nets, and sailcloth. The British Crown actively encouraged its production for naval supplies.

Claim 2: Washington grew it to get high, and his diary proves it. This is not supported. No data The single most-cited piece of "evidence" is Washington's diary entry from August 7, 1765: "Began to separate the Male from the Female hemp at Do — rather too late." Cannabis advocates have argued for decades that this proves Washington was producing sinsemilla — the unfertilized female flowers prized for THC content.

The problem: separating male from female hemp plants is also standard practice for fiber and seed production. Male plants produce finer, softer fiber and mature earlier; females produce seed. Eighteenth-century agricultural manuals routinely instructed farmers to separate the sexes for fiber quality and seed harvest ^[3][4]. Washington's note that he was "rather too late" is consistent with someone trying to manage seed production or fiber quality — not someone trying to prevent pollination of drug-type flowers.

There is also no evidence — none in his diaries, correspondence, or household records — that Washington consumed cannabis as a drug. Drug-type cannabis use was not a part of 18th-century Anglo-American culture. The recreational use of cannabis as "marihuana" did not enter American popular awareness until the early 20th century, brought largely through Mexico and the Caribbean ^[5].

Hemp vs. Marijuana: Why This Distinction Matters

Modern readers conflate "hemp" and "marijuana" because they are the same plant species — Cannabis sativa L. But they are radically different cultivars selected for different purposes.

• Industrial hemp: bred for tall stalks, long bast fibers, and low THC. Colonial-era hemp would have contained trace THC at most.
• Drug-type cannabis: bred for resinous flowers and high cannabinoid content.

The genetic and chemotypic divergence between fiber hemp and drug cannabis is well documented in modern genomic studies ^[6]. Smoking 18th-century Virginia fiber hemp would have produced a headache, not a high. Even if Washington had thrown a handful of his crop on a fire, he would not have gotten stoned in any meaningful sense.

The U.S. government's modern legal distinction — hemp as cannabis under 0.3% THC, codified in the 2018 Farm Bill — is arbitrary at the margins, but it tracks a real biological reality ^[7].

Where the Myth Came From

The "Washington grew weed" claim traces largely to the 1970s and the rise of the modern legalization movement. Jack Herer's influential 1985 book The Emperor Wears No Clothes leaned heavily on Founding Father hemp cultivation as moral and political ammunition for legalization ^[8]. Herer's broader thesis — that hemp had been suppressed by a conspiracy of industrialists — popularized a reading of historical hemp documents through a drug-policy lens they were never meant to bear.

The August 7, 1765 diary entry in particular became a meme in cannabis publications, often quoted without the surrounding agricultural context. By the 1990s the claim was sufficiently widespread that Mount Vernon's historians began publicly addressing it. The estate's official position today is straightforward: Washington grew hemp as a crop; there is no evidence he used it as a drug ^[1].

A related, even less defensible claim — that the Declaration of Independence was "written on hemp paper" — has been investigated by the National Archives, which states the document is on parchment (animal skin), not paper of any kind ^[9].

What To Do Instead

If you care about the case for legal cannabis, the Washington argument is bad rhetoric. It is easy to debunk, it makes advocates look credulous, and it distracts from much stronger arguments grounded in modern evidence about harm reduction, racial disparities in enforcement, and the failures of prohibition.

If you care about hemp history, the real story is genuinely interesting: hemp was strategic infrastructure for a naval-age economy, Washington and Jefferson both grew it, and its decline in the 19th century had to do with cotton, steam, and synthetic fibers — not a drug-war conspiracy.

And if someone tells you Washington was a stoner, you now have the receipts. He was a farmer who grew a fiber crop. That's the whole story.

For more myth-busting, see Indica vs Sativa Predicts Your High and The Myrcene 0.5% Couchlock Threshold.

Sources

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