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The Emperor Wears No Clothes remains the book that started it all
While many Jack Herer biographies mention that he started writing The Emperor Wears No Clothes while serving a 14-d

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The Emperor Wears No Clothes remains the book that started it all

While many Jack Herer biographies mention that he started writing The Emperor Wears No Clothes while serving a 14-day federal prison sentence in 1983, this neatly ironic nugget almost distracts from the sheer amount of time that went into his life-changing opus. For while his cell’s brief solitude may have offered Herer an opportunity to outline Emperor, he had already devoted the previous decade-plus to obsessively researching what would become the de facto manifesto of the cannabis/hemp movement. It took a further two years to complete, and only once a heavily-revised 1990 edition was released did sales started steamrolling towards the current 700,000-and-counting issues in multiple languages.

The book’s title alludes to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, wherein the central character’s public nudity is ignored by all until a child yells out the obvious. In Herer’s book, the myths, propaganda and hypocrisies behind America’s ban on hemp (since the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act) are the nudity—and he is the child insisting we notice. Its subtitle, The Authoritative Historical Record of Cannabis and the Conspiracy Against Marijuana, says it all. Herer documents the history of cannabis hemp, its myriad uses, the roots of pot prohibition and the petrochemical industry’s plot to outlaw this renewable source of energy, medicine, food, textiles and paper which he truly believed could save the world.

If all this sounds heavy-going, take heart: The Emperor Wears No Clothes is eminently readable to the point of actually being fun (with the help of illustrations) and is neither overly academic nor embarrassingly hippie-dippy. But make no mistake, Herer knew his stuff and the credibility of his book (and the movement it helped inspire) has been protected by his diligence. Note that the $100,000 offered to anyone who can disprove Emperor’s claims is yet to be collected. (Paul Rogers)

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