Prominent Republican admits to smoking hemp

"Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica." - Abraham Lincoln (from a letter written by Lincoln during his presidency to the head of the Hohner Harmonica Company in Germany)

We should add some more details to flesh out the former president's statement.

When Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, first strode onto the public stage in 1832 and stepped into American History, he was wearing a pair of hemp pants. All the years Abe was growing up, the dirt poor Lincoln family wore tow-linen, home-grown hemp cloth they wove themselves...

It is an oft repeated, and even more often ignored, fact that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written on hemp paper. Paper in the early days of America was made primarily from rags. Since the poor and the very poor constituted by far the largest percentage of the early American population, most of the rags available to be made into paper came off the backs of the poor were rags of tow-cloth or tow-linen. The other famous hemp-growing Presidents, Washington and Jefferson, grew hemp for cordage and to clothe their own field slaves...

and note especially, re the title and opening quotation:

the varieties of hemp grown for fiber contain less than .03% of the active ingredients for which its brother marijuana is world-famous. Today law enforcement in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois annually wastes significant time and resources each year gathering and destroying millions of wild hemp plants to puff-up their drug enforcement statistics.

But, we'll leave the last word to Abe...

"Prohibition... goes beyond the bound of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded" -Abraham Lincoln

(image credit here)