the manufacture of soap, paints, and similar products. The stem fibers were used for multiple manufacturing purposes, including the production of cloth and ropes. George Washington was among the earliest colonial planters who grew a major hemp crop, however there is documentation that hemp was cultivated for fiber in 1611, in Jamestown, Virginia, and 1632 in Massachusetts. By the mid-1800's, the hemp industry had reached its apex in America. By 1890, hemp grew wild everywhere in the United States: along roadsides and in meadows and abandoned fields. For the most part, it was ignored. [1] [3] [4] [1] Keep Off The Grass [2] Focus on Marijuana [3] The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Drugs [4] The Marijuana ConvictionMedicinally, cannabis was used much as it had been in England. Usually, an imported olive-brown paste called Tilden's Extract of Cannabis Sativa Indica, was prescribed. Otherwise, records of early cannabis use indicate its limitation to Fitz Hugh Ludlow, a bright, young scholar and writer. Many times, he took ten times the usual dose of one to six grams, and went into hallucinatory daydreams. Afterward, he would write of his experiences: "Ha! what means this sudden thrill? A shock, as of some unimagined vital force, shoots without warning throughout my entire frame, leaping to my fingers' ends, piercing my brain, startling me till I almost spring from my chair. I could not doubt it. I was in the power of the hasheesh influence. My first emotion was one of uncontrollable terror - a sense of getting something which I had not bargained for. That moment I would have given all I had or hoped to have to be as I was three hours before. No pain anywhere not a twinge in any fibre - yet a cloud of unmutterable strangeness was settling upon me, and wrapping me impenetrably in from all that was natural or familiar. Endeared faces, well known to me of old, surrounded me, yet they were not with me in my loneliness. I had entered upon a tremendo...
