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ARTICLE
HEMP
Cannabis
By Jeremy Daw
as
Currency
At a book signing some months ago I became
part of a long, proud American tradition. Near
the back of the line of reading customers came
a young gentleman who didn’t bring any of the
asked-for cash; undeterred, he approached me
with an alternate proposition. Finding the terms
of his counter-offer acceptable, I agreed and traded him a copy of my book for an eighth of cannabis.
lonial governments, many colonists preferred the
congruity and stability of easily measured commodities like beaver skins, tobacco leaves and, yes,
hemp. The practice of trading hemp seeds became
so commonly accepted that many colonial governments passed laws allowing colonists to pay some
or all of their taxes in hempseed, including Virginia
(1682), Maryland (1683), Pennsylvania (1706) and
Massachusetts (1735).
The use of cannabis as a de facto currency predates the founding of the United States and may
be found in the historical record in the early 17th
century. In Hemp: Lifeline to the Future, Chris
Conrad notes that “hemp was used for money
in most of the Americas from 1631 until the early 1800s” (1st Ed., p. 24). It was one of many de
facto currencies prevalent in the region before
British Parliament passed the homogenizing Currency Act of 1751; faced with competing notes of
fluctuating value issued by thirteen separate co-
The tradition revived in the 20th century, when jazz
musicians, Beats and hippies began trading cannabis in the underground economy. In his memoir,
Really the Blues, jazz pioneer “Mezz” Mezzrow describes his first time receiving a joint of cannabis
outside a Midwestern club where he was part of
the orchestra. Amazed at the power of the drug to
unleash his musical creativity, Mezzrow set up his
own underground network distributing “reefers”
to his friends in the Harlem jazz scene. Sometimes
he charged, but at other times “Mezz” and his as-
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