Quote Originally Posted by Myth1184
Thomas Jefferson DID NOT grow his own pot, just a wisetale. He was a die hard tobacco supporter.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew cannabis on their plantations. Jefferson, while envoy to France, went to great expense - and even considerable risk to himself and his secret agents - to procure particularly good hempseeds smuggled illegally into Turkey from China. The Chinese Mandarins (political rulers) so valued their hempseed that they made its exportation a capital offense.

http://www.jackherer.com/chapter01.html


Jefferson disliked tobacco, as he explained in his Farm Journal (16 March 1791):

"The culture [of tobacco] is pernicious. This plant greatly exhausts the soil. Of course, it requires much manure, therefore other productions are deprived of manure, yielding no nourishment for cattle, there is no return for the manure expended... It is impolitic... The fact well established in the system of agriculture is that the best hemp and the best tobacco grow on the same kind of soil. The former article is of the first necessity to the commerce and marine, in other words to the wealth and protection of the country. The latter, never useful and sometimes pernicious, derives its estimation from caprice, and its best value from the taxes to which it was formerly exposed..."

Jefferson was not fond of flax either, as he explained in a letter to George Fleming (29 Dec. 2825):

"Flax is so injurious to our lands and of so scanty produce that I have never attempted it. Hemp, on the other hand, is abundantly productive and will grow forever on the same spot, but the breaking and beating it is so slow, so laborious and so much complained of by our laborers, that I have given it up... But recently a method of removing the difficulty of preparing hemp occurred to me, so simple and so cheap. I modified a threshing machine to turn a very strong hemp-break, much stronger and heavier than those for the hand. By this the cross arm lifts and lets fall the break twice in every revolution of the wallower. A man feeds the break with the hemp stalks... where it is more perfectly beaten than I have ever seen done by hand... I expect that a single horse will do the breaking and beating of ten men."

Jefferson described the machine in greater detail in another letter of 1815, and he noted:

"Something of this kind has been so long wanted by the cultivators of hemp, that as soon as I can speak of its effect with certainty, I shall probably describe it anonymously in the public papers, in order to forestall the prevention of its use by some interloping patentee." (25)

Thomas Jefferson received U.S. Patent #1 for his invention.

http://www.rexresearch.com/hhist/hhist2~1.htm