The Medical Argument: What Herer Knew

“Chapter 6 of The Emperor Wears No Clothes compiled the medical literature on cannabis from peer-reviewed journals. In 1985, this was radical. By 2025, the FDA had approved multiple cannabinoid-based pharmaceuticals.”

When Jack Herer published The Emperor Wears No Clothes in 1985, cannabis was classified as Schedule I, no accepted medical use, high potential for abuse, cannot be prescribed. The classification was maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration despite accumulating peer-reviewed evidence for cannabis's therapeutic applications.

Chapter 6 of the book, titled 'Medical Literature on Cannabis Medicine,' compiled this evidence. It drew on published research going back to the nineteenth century, pharmaceutical companies had been producing cannabis-based medications until 1937, and on contemporaneous research that was accumulating despite the prohibition on clinical trials.

Herer's compilation of medical evidence was not systematic by academic standards. He did not distinguish between different qualities of evidence, between case reports and controlled trials, between animal and human studies. But the underlying point, that a substantial peer-reviewed literature supported cannabis's medical applications, and that the Schedule I classification contradicted that literature, was accurate.

By 2025, the FDA had approved prescription cannabidiol (CBD for epilepsy), dronabinol oral solution and dronabinol (synthetic THC for chemotherapy-induced nausea and AIDS-related weight loss), and nabilone (nabilone for chemotherapy nausea). The endocannabinoid system, the receptor network through which cannabis compounds act, had been identified in the 1990s and was now a target of active pharmaceutical research. The medical argument Herer made from compiled literature in 1985 had been substantially validated by a pharmaceutical industry that was now racing to develop proprietary cannabinoid compounds.

The irony was not lost on cannabis advocates: the same Schedule I status that prevented legitimate cannabis medical research was now being used to create patent-protected pharmaceutical alternatives. What was illegal as a plant could be profitable as a pill.

Sources

• Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes (1985)
• FDA, Approved Cannabis-Derived Pharmaceuticals (2024)
• Grotenhermen & Russo (eds.), Cannabis and Cannabinoids (2002)