So, a possible POD: Jeremy Osborne, who in OTL was stillborn in 1729 in Bristol, lives to grow to manhood and becomes a sailor for the East India Company. By 1756 he has become one of Robert Clive's men, and takes part in the conquest of Bengal the following year. He stays in India for another five years, marrying a native woman, one Arundhati Gupta. He discovers the recreational uses of cannabis, and, upon his wife's untimely death, resumes his life as a sailor, eventually settling down in the colony of Virginia in 1764. Finding out the profits that are being made from growing tobacco, and realizing that no-one in this part of the empire is as yet aware of hemp as another inhalable plant, he buys a farm and begins to grow hemp crops selected for potency, and starts advertising them as "just like tobacco, only better". The fad catches on as his neighbors realize they have another cash crop on their hands. By the early 1770s, Charlottesville, Va., has become famous for its "pipe hemp", as this variety of the plant is now known.
During the ARW, many American soldiers discover the usefulness of pipe hemp as a painkiller, and the popularity of the plant grows further; both common soldiers and officers prefer it to tobacco. As the saying goes, "It keeps a boat's sails taut and a man's mind relaxed". George Washington personally gives seeds from his own fields to a France-bound Marquis de Lafayette, who, along with US ambassador Benjamin Franklin, introduces the fad to the royal court in Versailles.
Gradually tobacco is displaced altogether as a smokable plant, instead being chewed. Throughout the 19th century and most of the 20th, a hemp pipe is as American as apple pie. The popularity of the weed however begins to decrease from the 1960s, as the rising countercultural movement associates it with conservative mainstream culture. In the 1970s and 1980s, despite the efforts of the hemp lobby, which is especially influential in the Dixie states as most hemp is grown south of the Mason-Dixon line and is represented at the federal level by such influential figures as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, health-conscious legislators successfully restrict the right to smoke in public places. By the early 21st century smoking hemp in public is seen as oafish and disrespectful of others, and while smokers account for about 30% of the population (with a somewhat higher proportion of female smokers, due to the soothing effects of hemp on menstrual cramps), they mostly indulge in private. However, public smoking remains tolerated in many other countries, including much of Europe.
