Newt Gingrich forgets marijuana’s American history
By Andrew Belonsky
Janaury 4, 2011
After finishing fourth in last night’s Iowa caucus, Newt Gingrich wasted little time traveling to New Hampshire, host of next week’s primary.
New Hampshire’s a far different beast than Iowa: it’s more moderate, less motivated by social issues and legendarily independent. The Live Free or Die State is basically the liberal version of Texas, the equally individualistic Lone Star State.
Despite its slogan, though, New Hampshire is the only Northeast State that has no decriminalization or medical marijuana laws. While the House last year passed a decriminalization bill, it was tabled in the Senate. No wonder then a voter asked Gingrich about his pot policy during a Concord town hall today. And it was a doozy.
“Would Thomas Jefferson or George Washington be arrested for growing marijuana?” the man asked, putting Gingrich in an awkward position: arrest two Founding Fathers or stick to his anti-pot platform.
The candidate replied, “I think Jefferson and George Washington would strongly discourage you from growing marijuana, and their tactics to stop you would be more violent than they would be today.”
Rosie Gray at BuzzFeed points out that “historian” Gingrich is wrong: Jefferson and Washington indeed both grew marijuana on their Virginia farms in hopes of making it big in the then-booming hemp industry. Both, however, failed.
The Straight Dope has this brief history lesson:
Washington used some of what he grew to make hemp clothing worn by his slaves. However, U.S. hemp exported to Britain often was of such poor quality that it couldn’t be sold, and Washington was never able to turn a profit on the crop despite sustained effort. Jefferson also seems to have grown hemp strictly for local consumption, from which we deduce he couldn’t make money at it either. In short, not only were Washington and Jefferson marijuana farmers, they were unsuccessful marijuana farmers.
What’s more, Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper (the final version was put on parchment). Gingrich is intentionally obscuring history to maintain a hardline against marijuana, which to opponents can only be used for getting hippies high, or simply needs to brush up on marijuana’s American history...
For the full article, go to:
http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/172354/newt-gingrich-forgets-marijuanas-american-history/
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