yea [the founding fathers took mushrooms]. no human being can have the knowledge to create something like the usa, or any other country without the help of something outside of normal human consciousness. take the mayans or the aztecs for example. most of their knowledge came from psycho active plants, look at all they have accomplished, they would not have gone as far as they did without them. i bet the tree of knowledge, so to speak, is what began all this religion, kings and queens, or any form of control. i know those who have ruled through our generations have had some form of help outside of what is considered normal, passed on from king to king, priest to priest, sorcerer to sorcerer. do some researched on all the countries, how they started, their flags, look at all their symbols, you might come up with the same conclusions.
17 comments
Psychedelics don’t magically grant you knowledge. If you don’t begin with a technical problem and a thorough understanding of the subject you’re working on, apart from seeing many of your preconceptions melt away, the only insight you’ll get out of a trip is some mystical nonsense.
That said, the Founding Fathers were possibly stoners. Marijuana wasn’t taboo back then, and Jefferson and Washington grew loads of hemp. So, who’s to say?
Mmm, no, I disagree. Drugs are incredibly useful. (RIP, Myron Stolaroff.)
Shrooms cause you to ascend to a higher plane of being.
One that escews proper grammar and spelling, apparently.
If the founding fathers took 'shrooms, I doubt we'd have ever bothered fighting a war for independence. They'd probably have been like, "Taxation without representation? Who cares about that when I've got a giant pink rabbit running around outside my house that's trying to eat me?"
Men as well educated as Jefferson and Washington would surely have been aware that the cannabis they grew had some psychoactive properties, though perhaps not precisely what they were. Apart from a single passage in one of Washington’s journals that noted he separated his female and male plants a little too late the context of which is a ambiguous, but does imply a desire for seed-free bud there certainly is no evidence they did partake in it.
However, it would be foolhardy to think this conclusively disproves the possibility that some people, the Founding Fathers included, may have used cannabis recreationally, simply omitting to make much of a note about it, as it likely wasn’t a widespread practice. Likewise, given that imperialization of India by the British was well underway by the time the American Revolutionary War rolled around, it’s not a stretch to think the concept of recreational cannabis use had been brought to the attention of the Western World’s intelligentsia.
So, who’s to say? Nobody really knows for sure, and while there’s no solid historical record, it’s not a leap to think it did occur either.
@jsonitsac
It had been used throughout Asia and in the Arabic world for many centuries prior millenia, even, as the discovery of a large amount of high-quality bud found in a 2700 year old shaman’s tomb in China’s Xinjiang province conclusively confirmed and it was regarded as a medicine in the West for likely just as long, with accounts from Claudius Galen, Pedanius Dioscorides, and Pliny the Elder confirming its use in Antiquity.
Yes, in America, hemp was mostly limited to fiber and livestock feed, industrially, prior to the 19th century. But, don’t forget that nonpsychoactive hemp cultivars are a fairly recent invention old industrial strains (many of which are sadly extinct or on the verge of extinction) in fact did contain significant amounts of THC; there was no real distinction between medicinal and industrial cannabis.
I'd have thought that knowledge of the recreational use of hemp would have reached Europe's intelligentsia via the trade routes through Constantinople and Venice well before the great European naval logistics revolution of the 15th century, let alone the great colonial revolts of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
@ #1496650
Spiritual, ritualistic, and medicinal use for sure, even well before then. Recreational use, hard to say, but unlikely.
One would think if people were more aware of the fun side of cannabis, there would be more demand for it, and there would be wide mention of it in art and literature, which just isn’t the case.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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