Who was Jack Herer and why does he matter?
Jack Herer died on April 15, 2010. An American activist, he gave his name to one of the most well-known cannabis strains and authored The Emperor Wears No Clothes, a book that served for decades as the bedside manual for the pro-hemp movement. Antonio Escohotado, author of the General History of Drugs, wrote the introduction to its Spanish edition, and it is that text we recover and comment on here.
Hemp is a plant of immemorial cultivation: it has been used to make tow, rope, textiles, and paper since ancient times, as well as medicine and a means of intoxication in very diverse cultures. Against that ancient backdrop, Escohotado situated Herer’s intervention as a milestone in the plant’s recent history.
Theory and practice: The dual front of Herer and Rosenthal
As Escohotado recounts, Herer and his most prominent colleague, Ed Rosenthal, witnessed firsthand the police crackdown that the psychedelic counterculture unleashed in the United States during the 1960s. Where others might have chosen to forget the harassment, they decided to intervene on its two causes: a situation of legal condemnation sustained—in Escohotado’s words—by “moralizing and pseudoscientific allegations,” and the user’s dependence on external, often poor-quality, supplies.
The response was to work on both theory and practice simultaneously. On the theoretical level, they approached the subject as encyclopedists: they reconstructed the political and economic vicissitudes of the plant, documented its historical uses, and tried to replace obscurantism with what Escohotado calls an enlightenment. The Emperor itself is the most visible fruit of Herer’s research as a historian; Rosenthal, for his part, authored an extensive bibliography on the subject, in which Escohotado highlights Marihuana, the Law and You (1995), a guide designed to minimize the legal consequences for those persecuted by the justice system.
From the university to the field
Escohotado recalls that both completed their university education—he notes that Herer held a degree in Philosophy and Rosenthal in Economics—with studies in botany and agronomic techniques. To this, they added exploratory trips through South America, Africa, and Asia to learn about different varieties of the plant in the field.
The result was a labor of classification and seed selection that, through hybridization and the incorporation of indoor cultivation, helped popularize seedless varieties and a notable diversity of psychoactive plants, both sativa and indica types. Escohotado cites the words of a high-ranking DEA official: “What they have done with this plant is amazing.” Escohotado himself celebrated this leap as a victory for the user, capable—he said—of choosing aroma and effect with the same freedom as a wine or coffee enthusiast.
Critical reading
Escohotado’s text is, above all, a tribute, and as such, it should be read with a certain distance. Three nuances seem pertinent from the perspective of current outreach:
- Celebratory tone. The introduction exalts the potency and self-sufficiency that genetic selection made possible. Today, we know that the sustained increase in THC concentration, along with the drop in CBD in many commercial varieties, is associated with a higher risk of anxiety and a worse profile for vulnerable people. “More potent” does not equal “better.”
- Harm reduction. Escohotado writes in a protest-oriented key, not one of public health. That is why it is worth remembering what his text does not address: consumption at an early age affects brain development, there is a component of dependency, and the legal context continues to vary enormously by country. These articles are not a guide for cultivation or consumption, and we deliberately omit practical figures that the original did offer.
- The book as a period document. The Emperor Wears No Clothes mixes rigorous history with debatable theses and claims about industrial hemp that subsequent research has nuanced. Its value is primarily historical and militant: it helps us understand how the contemporary pro-cannabis discourse was built, rather than establishing closed scientific facts.
With those caveats, Herer’s figure remains a key piece for understanding the psychoactive culture of the last half-century: that of someone who responded to prohibition with archives, documentation, and fieldwork, and not just with slogans.
