weed

donna

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
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Now Florida but always a Kentuckian
weed. 1. A cigar, especially a cheap one made of poor tobacco. 2. Tobacco in general; e.g. "Most people in camp chew weed."

From "The Language of the Civil War", by John D. Wright page 321.
 
I suspect a few did then as well. Why do you think the indians gave the Jamestown settlers tobacco? They were bogarting the weed, man.
 
This reminds me of a scene in the movie Gettysburg. Longstreet was at Lee's camp talking about their situation and Longstreet's cigar is unraveling. Then they hear the canons going off in the direction of where Heath is engaged with Buford.
 
It doesn't mean a cheap cigar or tobacco in todays terms...

I'm not so sure it did in 1862 either. At the Battle of Lone Jack the main attack came from a field of weeds/hemp. I've not checked into the specifics of the weeds and hemp sources but I remember finding it curious that they were used together to refer to the field.

Keep in mind that hemp was a major cash crop in Missouri and slaveowners in the region grew plenty of it. (See Jo Shelby.) Back then it was used to make rope for the steamboats that plied the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. So perhaps the field was being left fallow for a year and had a mix of actual weeds...and weed.
 
I figured this thread was going to take this turn...

This comes up a lot, when people discover that hemp was a big cash crop in Kentucky and Missouri in the period, but when one asks for actual documentation that people were smoking field hemp, it's all just speculation so far. And I think a lot of the speculation is based on a lack of information about the context of Indian hemp--what we'd call marijuana--in the period.

One thing to keep in mind is that marijuana and hemp were then, and are still today, two different varieties of the same plant, one bred to be high in THC and one bred to be useful for fiber, so smoking fiber hemp is, most likely, going to be more like smoking bad-tasting tobacco than anything else. But here's the thing: what we'd call marijuana shows up as a minor medicine in the US Pharmacopoeia under the classification cannabis indica, while fiber hemp was classified as cannabis sativa--two different species. There was speculation how closely related they were, but typically many medical people felt there was something to do with the climate or other conditions in India and elsewhere which produced the medical properties of cannabis indica, so there wasn't much incentive to grow it in the U.S., and like a lot of medicines, it was imported.

In other words, people were aware of cannabis indica as a minor medicinal drug, but they were also aware that fiber hemp didn't accomplish the same thing. Otherwise, doctors wouldn't have needed to import it halfway round the world.

If one wants to document any use of any cannabis preparation as a recreational drug, there was a fad for hasheesh recreationally in the late 1850s, generally among the upscale and/or city demographic--Louisa Mae Alcott wrote a short story about, hasheesh candy was advertised for sale, etc. Fitz Hugh Ludlow was one of the more prolific writers on the topic in the period. But it was imported, derived from cannabis indica, not from domestic hemp, and was typically eaten by drug-users here, rather than smoked.

I can provide further quotes and sources if wanted, but would be most curious to see any actual references to smoking fiber hemp recreationally, or medicinally for that matter, in the U.S., since my conclusion is that it wasn't done, or--since one can't say "never"--at most might have been done very rarely as a poor temporary, makeshift tobacco substitute, without considering it a useful drug in its own right. If somebody has a lot of info, we can start a new thread if it seems too off-topic here.
 
Found this after a quick google search. This is from Wiki.
A study published in the South African Journal of Science showed that "pipes dug up from the garden of Shakespeare's home in Stratford-upon-Avon contain traces of cannabis."[96] The chemical analysis was carried out after researchers hypothesized that the "noted weed" mentioned in Sonnet 76 and the "journey in my head" from Sonnet 27 could be references to cannabis and the use thereof.
I thought that was pretty cool but won't push this thread any further afield.
 
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