Did Old Ben Franklin invent the “joint?” One of the things that you realize when you get older is that the rich kids that founded our nation were really young. Alexander Hamilton was 21 years old in 1776. George Washington was 27.Benjamin Franklin, on the other hand, was 70 in 1776. Franklin was obviously a genius and a maverick. His contributions to science and literature are well known. He was doing advice columns (stitch in time, an ounce of prevention etc.) before we even had newspapers. Ben is also famous for his love of women and red wine – so long as he took his own advice about “moderation.” There’s also that famous story about the kite and the key when Ben was working out electricity.
But for many the more interesting tale is that Franklin might have been the first guy to figure out how to roll a joint – a ‘marijuana cigarette’ if you’re from the 1940’s. Human beings have smoked cannabis for tens of thousands of years but they mostly used pipes, chillums or hookahs. Who rolled the first joint is one of history’s great mysteries. Proving Ben Franklin invented the spliff (Jamaican for joint) is not something big time researchers are going to spend a lot of time on. But those studying his papers and writings say that it’s highly likely Franklin is the founding father of rolled cannabis.
Some people take tremendous comfort in the idea that while some very wealthy young people were trying to decide what percentage of humanness should be ascribed to women and people who were not white. They settled on 3/5ths for slaves, nothing for women. This is at the same time old Uncle Ben was engineering how to roll a doobie, jay, bone, spliff or any of the other names we know commonly use to describe cannabis in an environmentally friendly and smokable tube. Alexander Hamilton was an extremely wealthy, slave owning kid obsessed with executive power and domination. Ben Franklin was a thinker, a scientist and a writer. It would appear that today in the US we have a Hamilton surplus and a Franklin deficit. Ben would have likely told Alex, “Your problem is that you want power and will have it but you don’t have the first notion as to what to do with it or any idea of the responsibility that comes with it.”