The story of cannabis in the Americas does not begin with a counterculture, a dispensary, or a prohibition law. It begins with bondage. Scholars generally agree that cannabis — a plant with no indigenous roots in the Western hemisphere — arrived in the Americas during the sixteenth century carried by enslaved Africans aboard the same ships that were, in a bitter irony, rigged with sails and rope made from hemp. The plant crossed the Atlantic twice over: once as an industrial fiber keeping the vessels seaworthy, and once as seeds concealed by captives who had already integrated cannabis into the fabric of their daily lives.
The Portuguese were among the first Europeans to systematically transport enslaved Africans to the New World, and it was in their colony of Brazil that cannabis first took hold in the Americas, as early as the 1500s. The linguistic evidence alone is striking: virtually every Brazilian name for cannabis — macumba, diamba, liamba, pungo, and others — traces to African dialects, many spoken by enslaved people originally from Angola, where cannabis smoking, often through water pipes, was already an established cultural practice. These were not accidental linguistic borrowings. They are the fingerprints of people who carried something of their home with them into unimaginable circumstances.
On the newly cleared sugar plantations of northeast Brazil, cannabis found its first foothold in New World soil — quite literally planted between rows of sugarcane, tolerated and then encouraged by Portuguese plantation owners who observed that enslaved laborers appeared to manage the brutal heat and fieldwork more capably when they smoked the herb. From there, the plant spread along trade and labor routes, slowly filtering northward through South America, across the Panamanian isthmus, and into Mexico. Indigenous communities who encountered it, already sophisticated in their use of psychoactive plants for ritual, medicine, and ceremony, adopted it with relative ease. By the time it reached the port cities of coastal Brazil — among fishermen and dockworkers who smoked it casually — cannabis had already begun accumulating a medicinal reputation across Latin America and the Caribbean: as a leaf tea brewed for rheumatism, colic, sleep disorders, and what the period called “female troubles”; as a topical packed on the gums for tooth pain; as an alcohol-soaked poultice for arthritic joints.
The word marijuana itself may have derived from mariguango, a Portuguese term meaning “intoxicant,” though this etymology, like much cannabis history, exists in contested territory.
The Fiber That Built Empires
While cannabis was taking root in Brazil through the agency of enslaved people, the European colonial powers were thinking about hemp in an entirely different register. For them, it was not a medicine or a ritual plant — it was infrastructure. In an age when naval supremacy determined geopolitical dominance, hemp was as strategic a resource as oil would become centuries later. The plant’s fiber, uniquely resistant to saltwater decay, was the essential material for ship sails, ropes, and rigging. Every major maritime power — England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal — maintained its fleet on the back of a reliable hemp supply. Christopher Columbus, Magellan, Sir Francis Drake, the Conquistadors, and the Pilgrims who made landfall at Plymouth Rock all sailed on it. So did the estimated eleven to twenty million Africans who were transported across the Atlantic in conditions so catastrophic that up to a third did not survive the crossing.
Governments understood the stakes clearly. In 1533, King Henry VIII issued a royal command requiring English farmers to cultivate hemp or face financial penalty — an order his daughter Queen Elizabeth I repeated thirty years later. The same logic crossed the Atlantic into Britain’s American colonies. In 1619, the Virginia assembly passed a law mandating that every household in the colony grow hemp, eight years after colonists had first planted it at Jamestown. Some of the earliest settlers in North America came over under arrangements that tied their transit to hemp cultivation. In New England’s fertile soil, hemp reportedly grew twice as tall as it did in Britain.
The crop became so deeply embedded in colonial life that its legacy persists in place names scattered across the eastern seaboard and Midwest — Hempstead, Hempfield, Hemp Hill, and their variants. Early American families wore hemp clothing, wrote on hemp paper, dried their hands with hemp towels, and sewed with hemp thread. At a moment when hard currency was perpetually scarce, hemp was sometimes accepted as legal tender. It was not a luxury or a novelty. It was the material substrate of everyday existence.
Several of the Founding Fathers grew hemp, or attempted to. George Washington raised it at Mount Vernon, and his diaries record the effort with the same methodical attention he brought to all his agricultural operations. His May 1765 entry notes that he “Sowed Hemp at Muddy hole by Swamp”; in August he recorded that he had begun to “separate the Male from the Female hemp… rather too late.” Cannabis enthusiasts have long seized on this detail as evidence that Washington was cultivating high-potency cannabis — the kind that requires separating male plants from females before pollination to produce seedless, resin-heavy sinsemilla. The inference is colorful but almost certainly wrong. As Michael Aldrich, who researched Washington’s hemp-growing practices as a doctoral student at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the 1960s, concluded: Washington didn’t smoke cannabis, and he didn’t know it could be smoked.
Washington’s preoccupation with seed separation was agronomic, not psychoactive. He wanted to maximize hempseed yield for the following year’s crop, and Edmund Quincy’s 1765 hemp cultivation guide — “A Treatise of Hemp-Husbandry,” authored by a cousin of John Adams — spelled out that males were to be separated from females after seeds had been set on the latter, so the seed-bearing females could mature fully in the sun. This is precisely the opposite of the sinsemilla method, which removes males before pollination begins in order to prevent seed formation entirely and redirect the plant’s energy into resin production. Washington wanted seeds. He implored his gardener to “make the most of Indian hempseed. Sow it everywhere.” This was a national security argument as much as an agricultural one: developing a domestic hemp supply meant the colonies would not have to depend on — or remain vulnerable to — Britain for a material upon which military and maritime power directly depended.
Revolution, Commerce, and the Beginning of the End
Hemp’s entanglement with the politics of American independence was not incidental. Before the Boston Tea Party became the celebrated symbol of colonial defiance, hemp had already become a point of friction. When American producers began processing their own hemp fiber rather than shipping raw bales back to Britain — defying the Crown’s lucrative standing offer — it was an act of economic rebellion. Benjamin Franklin owned a mill that converted hemp pulp into paper, and American patriots used that paper to print and circulate the arguments for independence. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, explicitly cited the fact that hemp “flourishes” in the colonies as evidence that the Americans could sustain themselves without British supply chains. Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence on Dutch hemp paper; his second draft, also on hemp paper, was ratified on July 4, 1776, before being transcribed onto animal parchment.
Jefferson not only grew hemp but worked — covertly, from the British perspective — to obtain new varieties of hempseed from abroad. He considered it a superior crop to tobacco, which he called “pernicious,” and wrote that “the greatest service which can be rendered by any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.” He continued growing fiber hemp after leaving the presidency, relying, as all hemp operations of the era did, on enslaved labor for the planting, harvesting, and brutal physical work of processing the raw fiber — pounding the stalks, extracting the usable material, preparing it for manufacture. By 1815, even Jefferson had given it up. The plant grew abundantly, he acknowledged, but the labor of processing it by hand was “so slow, so laborious, and so much complained of” that the economics no longer held.
This was a structural problem, not a local one. The domestic hemp industry in the early republic ran on enslaved Black labor. As the frontier expanded westward, large hemp operations spread through Missouri, Mississippi, and especially Kentucky, where the crop carried a racial epithet in common usage that made explicit the system underpinning it. Hemp’s prosperity and slavery’s violence were not parallel phenomena — they were the same phenomenon.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, hemp had become America’s third-largest crop, trailing only cotton and tobacco. The California Gold Rush of 1849 had an indirect hemp connection: John Augustus Sutter, the Swiss émigré on whose land gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, had acquired a hemp-thrashing machine from a Russian trading post at Fort Ross in Northern California. Some prospectors made the overland journey west in wagons covered with hemp canvas. In the frontier West, the hangman’s noose was known colloquially as the “hemp collar” — one of the grimmer applications of a plant that had by then worn a hundred different guises across three centuries.
Hemp’s decline as a fiber crop was already underway by the time the Civil War began in 1861, driven out by new technologies — the cotton gin, the steamship — that reduced the urgency for hemp-derived rope and sail. As fiber hemp faded commercially, cannabis began its next chapter in American life: as a medicine, circulating in patent remedies and pharmacopeias, its psychoactive properties still largely uncharted by mainstream American culture. The pivot from rope to remedy would set the stage for everything that followed.
What this history demands is a reckoning with the full complexity of cannabis’s origins in the Americas. It was not introduced by explorers or botanists or curious colonists. It arrived through the forced movement of enslaved people, took root through their labor and knowledge, spread through their networks, and then was industrialized through their continued exploitation. The hemp that helped build the revolutionary republic, clothe its armies, print its founding documents, and finance its expansion was grown and processed by people who received none of the liberty those documents promised. Any serious accounting of cannabis in American history has to hold all of that at once — the plant’s genuine strategic and cultural significance, and the human cost on which that significance was built.