As Pot Goes Proper, a History of Weed The grass is no greener. But, finally, it's legal - at least somewhere in America. It's been a long, strange trip for marijuana. Washington state and Colorado voted to legalize and regulate its recreational use last month. But before that, the plant, renowned since ancient times for its strong fibers, medical use and mind-altering properties, was a staple crop of the colonies, an "assassin of youth," a counterculture emblem and a widely accepted - if often abused - medicine. On the occasion of Thursday's "Legalization Day," when Washington's new law takes effect, here's a look back at the cultural and legal status of the "evil weed" in American history. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew hemp and puzzled over the best ways to process it for clothing and rope. Indeed, cannabis has been grown in America since soon after the British arrived. In 1619 the Crown ordered the colonists at Jamestown to grow hemp to satisfy England's incessant demand for maritime ropes, Wayne State University professor Ernest Abel wrote in "Marihuana: The First Twelve Thousand Years." Hemp became more important to the colonies as New England's own shipping industry developed, and homespun hemp helped clothe American soldiers during the Revolutionary War. Some colonies offered farmers "bounties" for growing it. "We have manufactured within our families the most necessary articles of cloathing," Jefferson said in "Notes on the State of Virginia." Those of wool, flax and hemp are very coarse, unsightly, and unpleasant. Jefferson went on to invent a device for processing hemp in 1815. Books such as "The Arabian Nights" and Alexandre Dumas' "The Count of Monte Cristo," with its voluptuous descriptions of hashish highs in the exotic Orient, helped spark a cannabis fad among intellectuals in the mid-19th century. "But what changes occur!" one of Dumas' characters tells an uninitiated acquaintance. When you return to this mundane sphere from your visionary world, you would seem to leave a Neapolitan spring for a Lapland winter -- to quit paradise for earth -- heaven for hell! Taste the hashish, guest of mine -- taste the hashish. After the Civil War, with hospitals often overprescribing opiates for pain, many soldiers returned home hooked on harder drugs. Those addictions eventually became a public health concern. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, requiring labeling of ingredients, and states began regulating opiates and other medicines - including cannabis. By the turn of the 20th century, cannabis smoking remained little known in the United States - but that was changing, thanks largely to The Associated Press, says Isaac Campos, a Latin American history professor at the University of Cincinnati. In the 1890s, the first English-language newspaper opened in Mexico and, through the wire service, tales of marijuana-induced violence that were common in Mexican papers began to appear north of the border - helping to shape public perceptions that would later form the basis of pot prohibition, Campos says. By 1910, when the Mexican Revolution pushed immigrants north, articles in the New York Sun, Boston Daily Globe and other papers decried the "evils of ganjah smoking" and suggested that some use it "to key themselves up to the point of killing."