Happy Birthday To The Emperor Jack Herer: The Legend Never Die
Jack Herer is one of the most important and influential activist in the long war against cannabis prohibition. He was undoubtedly the only one capable of earning a front page in the Wall Street Journal and selling nearly a million copies with a book on hemp. We are talking about Jack Herer, who died on April 15, 2010, following a heart attack. Jack Herer was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1939. He began his anti-prohibition activism in the hippie generation, ending up in jail several times.
Jack Herer was never an elected legislator who could influence legislation formally. He wasn’t yet a billionaire willing to buy influence. But his unique mixture of genius intelligence, relentless curiosity, knowledge, and enthusiastic skills of people made his power of nature whose impact can only feel it.
Everyone, excluding full Johnny arrivals in cannabis society, is presumably conscious of Jack “The Hemperor” Herer as maybe the most powerful guy in the current legalization movement. The 1985 book, The Emperor Wears No Clothing, which ignited and continues to be the manifesto and consecration of almost four decades for resentful, charismatic activism, was written by Herer. The guy has passed in America seeking to legalize cannabis and tobacco. If not for Herer, we would not be degraded here in California (and elsewhere), or almost half the state electorate might send us the node of complete legalization.
Importance of Education
However, though others may have read his book (The Emperor sold more than 700,000 copies over 11 years), heard him speak, or shake his hand (as Herer was the ultimate one-stop, face-to-face campaigner), few understood the whole man or the depth of his assignment. In an exclusive interview, CULTURE spoke with Jeannie Herer, his widow, for an insight into the husband whose continued impact he thought he could give the world a difference.
Jack Herer “had the spirit of everyone I’ve ever known,” remembers Jeannie, who radiates love. Herer saw how you could transform the thinking of a person very quickly if you educate them. And that was an educationalist. He was an educator who thought that he — that we — could improve the world if we understood only all the details about cannabis. He was an educator, and he felt that we could save the world.
Active Days Have Gone By
 During one of his stays behind bars, he began writing what is undoubtedly the most influential book on hemp ever written in the world today: The Hemperor Wears No Clothes. This book results from years of study, experiments, interviews, and some of the ban’s birth hypotheses. Or how a fight against marijuana conceived to avoid the production of cannabis. The first is to show that in the 1930s, the emerging plastic, oil, paper, and medicinal industry challenged their interests. This book has been the result of years of research.
Jack Herer found no publisher willing to publish The Hemperor Wears No Clothes, so he decided to do it all by himself, printing and distributing it independently at public events. It was a resounding success. Since its publication, 1985, it has been translated into twelve languages and sold over 800,000 copies.Â
Jack Herer's Back Story
Jack Herer’s life was full of fascinating contradictions, as it were with many people of his level of influence, which only increased his message. See, he was not born a hippie or a democrat and only became hemp when he was 30 years old. Fresh converts say that to be the greatest zealots, and Herer was one of the greatest. He longed for the epiphany of others.
Herer, born in 1939 in New York City, worked during the Korean War as an army policeman. He reportedly threatened to abandon the former of his four wives after finding out that she had smoked marijuana a Pro-War Republican prohibitionist (who called his first son to prominent conservative U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater according to Jeannie). Herer discovered weed himself (“a girl he was truthful over talking to him to smoke a couple,” Jeannie says), and he soon reinvented himself after moving to Los Angeles in 1967 and divorcing his wife.
Still a fascinated and enthusiastic reader, Herer took a peek at all the marijuana and co-wrote the G.R.A.S.S. comic. ‘ by 1973, inventing smoking accessories. He opened the western world’s first hemp store on Venice Beach (as well as later anthesis), and the Great Groundbreaking American Standard Method (G.R.A.C.S.) was the Official Textbook on Marija Quality Measurement on 1 – 10 Scales. Herer and Ed Adair, a fellow smoke shop owner, began a movement in 1973 to legitimize marijuana. Or you’re going to try. Herer almost did this, ultimately succumbing to the symptoms of a heart attack, just minutes after a speech in Portland’s Hempstalk Festival in September 2009, which was characteristically passionate.
The battle was abandoned by Herer (April 15, 2010), who had not filed taxes in more than thirty years, which would have earned him a smile.
A Courageous Heart
Although he had never completely understood his dreams, Herer would not only let his head go. “Never, never ever! “This is what Jeannie tells, who in 2000 married him. He was a hippie, loved the grateful dead, and looked like a hippie. He was a great guy. “It was a hippie. Yet rather than around the stars. It valued such people as the veterans living in L.A.’s displaced veterans under the bridges. These guys offered to help him get signatures on the sheet to pass on his proposals. Those are the sort of people Jack worked with, was a buddy with, and loved by street people. And he hanged out like that.
“This [legalization] he never stopped talking. And he had a magnetic character. He wasn’t timid about going out and sharing the message. He put up a large giant paddling rink at the Federal Building [in 1980] and had people camped hundreds of days at a time. He’s been fascinated.
She began writing The Emperor Wears No Clothes in 1983, publishes in hemp, inevitably, in 1985 (at which point he opened a cigarette shop in Portland, Oregon called The Third Eye, and remains the family property in the city) while serving two-week federal incarceration (for not paying $5 fines for voters registration in a parking lot). Emperor was a 12-year exuberant commodity researching the various advantages of cannabis and hemp use (from paper and textiles to home and industry).
In Memoriam Of Jack Herer
A mural dedicated to Jack Herer in Venice Beach (Los Angeles) Herer was so convinced of the correctness of what he had written about the conspiracy of some American industries against cannabis (starting with DuPont and the journalism magnate William R. Hearst) that he arrived at the point of offering $ 100,000 to anyone who could prove him wrong.Â
No one ever succeeded in the prosperous enterprise. In the following years, Mr. Herer continued to travel all over the U.S.A. and not only to tell everyone about the potential of hemp and the need to fight against prohibition. Gifted with extraordinary charisma, he was able to act as an inspiration for many of the experiences that marked the fight against the ban. After his untimely death, events, magazines, graffiti, and marijuana varieties dedicated to him.Â
However, the best way to remember him and keep his teaching alive is sure to read his book The Hemperor Wears No Clothes, an extraordinarily current book even more than 30 years later. You can do it for free from our site by downloading it in pdf format at this link.
