Jack Herer

Jack Herer turned the case against cannabis prohibition into a story about hemp. His book The Emperor Wears No Clothes, which he published himself in 1985, argued that the same plant banned as a drug could supply fibre, paper, fuel, food and medicine, and that the government had kept the evidence of this from its own citizens. By 2020 it was in its fourteenth edition, having never gone out of print.

He had been a Goldwater Republican, then a head-shop owner; he opened his first in 1973. He founded a group called Help End Marijuana Prohibition, HEMP, and twice ran for president of the United States on the Grassroots Party ticket, in 1988 and 1992, winning a few thousand votes.

The book

Herer says he had been collecting information on cannabis since 1973 when he finished the first edition. The book made industrial hemp, medical use and opposition to prohibition, which the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 had begun at federal level, part of one reform argument. It is frequently cited in campaigns to decriminalise or legalise cannabis and to expand industrial hemp. Its larger claims for the plant have been challenged by specialists.

Herer’s claim	What specialists say
Hemp yields far more than other crops	The Dutch agronomist Hayo van der Werf found that maize, sugar beet or potato give similar dry yields in good conditions, while hemp does better in poor ones
Hemp hurds are 77 per cent cellulose	Measured values are 32 to 38 per cent; the figure may confuse the woody core with the bark
Hemp could replace timber and fossil fuels	The author’s claims, repeated widely, not established findings

An argument built from many names

The opening chapter deliberately assembles words such as hemp, marijuana, ganja and bhang as names for one plant. This is a campaigning device: it asks readers familiar with a prohibited drug to reconsider the ordinary crop behind the name. The argument moves between American colonial cultivation, medicines and industrial uses to make prohibition seem inconsistent with that longer history.

Those names do not always identify the same product. Bhang, flowering tops, resin and fibre have different preparations and legal histories. Herer’s rhetorical unity should not erase those distinctions or turn every historical claim in the opening chapter into a verified fact.

The book also contains other voices. A prologue in the available later text is signed by lawyer Michael E. Rose on 13 May 1998. Its account of arrests and sentencing is Rose’s intervention in the debate, not a passage written by Herer in the original 1985 edition.

The movement

In 2000 he had a heart attack and a stroke at the BioFach trade show and recovered most of his speech and movement. In September 2009 he collapsed with a heart attack backstage at a hemp festival in Portland, Oregon, and he died in Eugene the following April.

A cannabis strain first bred by Sensi Seeds carries his name and has won prizes at the Cannabis Cup, where he was also inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame for his book. Nearly every seed bank now sells its own version.^[1][2]