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By Adam Tschorn
For a guy who legitimately belongs on the Mount Rushmore of weed, many people don’t know jack about, activist, author, and strain namesake Jack Herer — or even how to correctly pronounce his name for that matter. (It rhymes with “terror.”) I know this because, until a few years ago, I was one of those people. Then I bought a copy of his seminal work “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” and learned the true debt of gratitude the cannabis community owes the bushy-bearded author.
Even today, the chunky hemp bible sits on the corner of my desk as a daily reminder that education and evangelism — actually doing the work —will always be powerful antidotes to misinformation in the battle for plant medicine.
Who was Jack Herer, and why is he important to cannabis history?
According to his Los Angeles Times obituary, Herer was born in New York City on June 18, 1939, the youngest of three children, and served in Korea as an Army military police officer. He moved to Los Angeles in 1967 with his wife and three sons to work at a neon sign company. It was in L.A., two years later, where he tried marijuana for the first time. His curiosity about cannabis quickly led him to get involved with the legalization movement that was taking shape in the Golden State.
“One day in 1972, a very ordinary looking man with short hair — not a hippie — walked into our Los Angeles California Marijuana Initiative office and said he’d like to help legalize marijuana,” cannabis scholar, activist and California Cannabis Historical Society board member Michael Aldrich recalls. “We asked him to help with [some of] the precincting [work] and he was happy to do so. He said his name was Jack Herer and he’d just gotten out of the military.”
“As we were talking,” Aldrich continued, “I showed Jack a packet of the Acapulco Gold rolling papers — the ones made with hemp paper [that we were selling to fund the CMI effort]. He was astonished and said, ‘You mean there’s something else you can do with it besides smoke it?’ Jack sure grabbed that ball of twine and ran with it! He spent the next several years researching hemp paper.”
That chance encounter with a packet of hemp rolling papers, and the curiosity it sparked, would profoundly shape the arc of Herer’s life. In 1973, the same year he opened the head shop High Country in Van Nuys, he wrote “G.R.A.S.S.,” (a cheeky acronym for “Great Revolutionary American Standard System,” a 49-page booklet promoting a 1-to-10 scale for grading marijuana.
But it would take several more years — more than a dozen in all — of digging through the Library of Congress archives on the hunt for proof that the U.S. government had suppressed evidence about the plant’s potential in the run up to passing the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.
What was “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” and why did it matter?
The result of his efforts, first published in 1985, was “The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Authoritative Historical Record on Cannabis and the Conspiracy Against Marijuana,” part polemic, part historical excavation and part rallying cry.
It used government documents and industrial records to build a sweeping argument: hemp had been deliberately vilified and outlawed despite its extraordinary utility as paper, fiber, fuel, food and medicine.
Herer used the book as a soapbox from which to make the case that hemp prohibition was an ecological and economic crime. He argued that industrial hemp could have reduced deforestation, replaced petrochemical plastics and reshaped American agriculture but for the political and corporate interests that benefited from its ban. (It’s hard not to see parallels to Herer’s argument in the current-day opposition to rescheduling at the federal level.) And, most importantly, it lit a fuse for the activism that would (eventually) force a change in prohibition laws.
The impact of the book was enormous and profound. It has sold more than 700,000 copies worldwide to date (and perhaps as many as 1 million copies are floating around out there according to some estimates) and become a foundational text for hemp and cannabis activists along the way.
And it made Herer one of the movement’s most recognizable figures. He was soon dubbed the “Emperor of Hemp,” and took his book’s message directly to the people, crisscrossing the country giving lectures, staffing information booths and delivering enthusiastic speeches.
What was Jack Herer known for as an activist?
Through the book and beyond it, Herer’s biggest contribution to the cause was to meticulously lay out — often using its own documents — how the U.S. government was deliberately misrepresenting the plant’s potential. And, by arming themselves with the tools of truth, the citizenry could enact change.
This excerpt from the introduction to the 1998 to 2007 edition of the book — in Herer’s own words — sums it up best. “My hope is that this book helps everyone under-stand the true nature of cannabis hemp and that you, dear reader, decide to become active in the effort to end this crime against man and nature: marijuana prohibition.
This book is meant to provide you with the tools , the incontrovertible facts, and the sense of outrage needed to overcome more than 70 years of continual governmental lies and suppression of the truth.”
He helped highlight the issue in other ways too. In 1980, he and fellow head shop owner Ed Adair became co-commanders of the Reefer Raiders, a group that did stunts like setting up camp on the lawn of the federal building in Westwood and openly smoking joints for the media.
His L.A. Times obituary notes that in the 1980s he could often be found manning an information booth on the Venice Boardwalk (frequently posting up not far from fellow activist Jerry Rubin) “show[ing] obvious pleasure in trying to persuade skeptics.”
In 1983, he ran afoul of a new state law that made it a misdemeanor to sell devices to use with illegal drugs. Police raided his shop twice, and confiscated more than 6,000 items. He ended up serving two years probation and was ordered to pay a $1,500 fine.
He was a fixture on the speaking circuit, evangelizing the herb until the end of his life. He suffered a debilitating heart attack after delivering one of his typical free-the-plant speeches at the Portland, Ore., Hempstalk festival in September 2009, and never fully recovered. He passed away on April 15, 2010, at the age of 70.
How did the Jack Herer strain get its name?
In 1994 — somewhere between the ninth and tenth printing of the book — Netherlands-based Sensi Seeds honored the high-profile author and activist with a namesake cultivar.
According to Leafly, Sensi created the sativa-dominant smoke by “combining a Haze hybrid with a Northern Lights #5 and Shiva Skunk cross … hoping to capture both cerebral elevation and heavy resin production.”
The resulting strain has a distinctive woody, earthy and citrusy flavor profile defined by its most abundant terpene Terpinolene (an herbal-meets-floral terpene that’s also found in nutmeg, apples and lilacs), with peppery Caryophyllene and piney Pinene as supporting players.
By all accounts, Jack Herer the herb was as widely celebrated as Jack Herer the man, notching a 1994 first-place finish at the Amsterdam High Times Cannabis Cup right out of the gate (it would notch first-place wins in the competition at least two more times in 1999 and again in 2006) and earning additional awards, accolades and fans over the years.
First distributed in the 1990s by Dutch pharmacies as a recognized medical-grade strain, its popularity eventually led to seed banks, growers around the world offering their own take on the spicy, pine-forward cultivar.
Why does Jack Herer still matter today?
Although Herer never saw the fruits of his life’s labor (although California became the first state to enact medical legislation in in 1996, recreational cannabis wouldn’t become a reality until four years after his passing when Colorado legalized it in 2014) he certainly laid the groundwork, lit the fuse and, most importantly, wrote the playbook.
That’s why his legacy still matters, and his name has heft. And that’s why big, black tour buses emblazoned with his photo and scrawled signature turn up at cannabis conferences, magazine launch parties and dispensary anniversaries.
So, next time you see the name Jack Herer (rhymes with terror) on a dispensary menu jar of flower, vape cart or somewhere else, take a moment to mouth a silent “thank you” to the man behind the strain, an activist, author and enthusiastic agitator who, one he learned how legal weed would make the world a better place, set about to make it so.
Photo by Tomas Ryant
Jack Herer, cannabis activist: A THC Timeline
1939: Jack Herer is born on June 18 in New York City.
1969: Herer smokes cannabis for the first time in Los Angeles.
1972: While working on the California Marijuana Initiative, he discovers hemp’s industrial potential, setting the course for his life’s work.
1985: The first edition of The Emperor Wears No Clothes is published after a dozen years of research.
1994: Sensi Seeds debuts the Jack Herer cultivar in the Netherlands.
2010: Jack Herer dies on April 15.
2020: The 14th edition of the book is released on February 14.
FAQ's about Jack Herer
No. The most traceable origin story for “420” points to five friends from San Rafael High School in California: Steve Capper, Dave Reddix, Jeffrey Noel, Larry Schwartz, and Mark Gravich. In 1971, they used “420” as code for cannabis and would meet at 4:20 p.m. after school.
The cultivar was named in tribute to Jack Herer, honoring his role as a prominent cannabis activist and author. Sensi Seeds created the sativa-dominant smoke by combining a Haze hybrid with a Northern Lights #5 and Shiva Skunk cross.
Yes, Jetty offers a high THC vape named, “Jack”. Visit our store locator here.
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