Five years ago, on April 15, we lost author and activist Jack Herer. If his name isn’t familiar, the fruits of his labor certainly are. The changing tides regarding marijuana and hemp legislation along with the fault lines that are currently cracking through the edifice of the War on Drugs all owe their contemporary roots to the author and his books, especially The Emperor Wears No Clothes — an encyclopedic romp through the history of cannabis and hemp, and the military/industrial/police state phalanx that has trampled them underfoot for decades…
The Emperor Wears No Clothes is a non-fiction book written by Jack Herer. Starting in 1973, the story begins when Jack Herer takes the advice of his friend “Captain” Ed Adair and begins compiling tidbits of information about the Cannabis plant and its numerous uses,[1] including as hemp and as a drug. After a dozen years of collecting and compiling historical data, Herer first published his work as The Emperor Wears No Clothes in 1985. The eleventh edition was published in November 2000, and the book continues to be cited in cannabis rescheduling and re-legalization efforts.
The book, backed by H.E.M.P. (America), Hanf Haus (Germany), Sensi Seeds/Hash, Marihuana & Hemp Museum, Amsterdam, (Netherlands), and T.H.C., the Texas Hemp Campaign (America), offers $100,000 to anyone who can disprove the claims made within. Quoting from the book’s back cover:
“If all fossil fuels and their derivatives, as well as trees for paper and construction were banned in order to save the planet, reverse the Greenhouse Effect and stop deforestation; then there is only one known annually renewable natural resource that is capable of providing the overall majority of the world’s paper and textiles; meet all of the world’s transportation, industrial and home energy needs, while simultaneously reducing pollution, rebuilding the soil, and cleaning the atmosphere all at the same time… and that substance is — the same one that did it all before — Cannabis Hemp… Marijuana!”
The title of the book alludes to the classic fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Hans Christian Andersen. Herer uses Andersen’s story as an allegory for the current prohibition of cannabis.
You don’t have to be a pothead to hear Herer’s messages of environmental common-sense and the madness of the War on Drugs, and the man and his book deserve a big part of the credit for the better world they continue to make even five years after his death. Here’s the documentary Jack Herer: Emperor of Hemp, narrated by that great voice of the counterculture, Peter Coyote…
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