This article was originally published on the Marijuana Patients Organization site on November 25, 2015.
From the pages of Mourt’s Relation, a journal about the Plymouth Pilgrim experience written by Edward Winslow around 1621 – documenting the Very First Thanksgiving:
“Many kinds of herbs we found here in winter, as strawberry leaves innumerable, sorrel, yarrow, carvel, brooklime, liverwort, watercresses, great store of leeks and onions, and an excellent strong kind of flax and hemp.”
Jamestown colonists brought with them cannabis hemp to Virginia in 1611, and quickly became a valuable resource for both the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements. So important to the early American colonists that laws were passed — in Virginia in 1619 and Massachusetts in 1639 — that required farmers to plant hemp seed.
This Thanksgiving in 2015, over 50% of Americans have access to medical marijuana and are enjoying a better quality of life. Something truly to be thankful for.