Birthday Present for George Washington: Bring Hemp Back to Mt. Vernon, A New Posting by Stephen Young on the Bryan William Brickner Blog

George Washington’s 282^nd birthday and hemp’s colonial and current popularity are the focus of a new posting on the Bryan William Brickner blog by Stephen Young.

Young produced the 2009 hemp documentary, Government Grown: How Polo Illinois Helped Win the War, and authored Maximizing Harm: Losers and Winners in the Drug War (2000). The documentary film tells the story of how the US government needed hemp during WW II and built a hemp industry, part of which is still standing in Polo, Illinois. Young’s book noted that policies supporting the prohibition of drugs, and thereby a hemp economy, often made matters worse and not better.

In “Birthday Present for George Washington: Bring Hemp Back to Mt. Vernon,” Young connects Washington’s farming to his fondness for hemp and whiskey: “As initially reported by Reason a couple years ago, a group is using Washington’s historical recipes and methods in an effort to accurately recreate his whiskey. But I propose a more family-oriented way to relive the past that gives a different sense of Washington’s entrepreneurial spirit: bring back hemp to Mt. Vernon.”

Young continued: “As noted in The Cannabis Papers, Washington succeeded at his hemp business, and he expressed interest in it that seemed to go beyond mere profit. Washington described visiting the hemp plots regularly and seemed disappointed when he missed parts of the growing cycle.”

“That interest is easy to understand today,” Young added: “Hemp was crucial to the colonies and the new states; hemp could be crucial now to our economy, if only it were allowed to be grown by American farmers. There’s no better place to start a new – hemp – tradition than at Mt. Vernon.”

Young’s article appears on the Bryan William Brickner blog, an ongoing resource for the political science of constitutions and the biological science of cannabinoids.