The Twelve-Year Research Project

“In 1973, Jack Herer's friend Captain Ed Adair told him to start keeping notes. Twelve years later, those notes became The Emperor Wears No Clothes. It has sold over 800,000 copies without ever appearing on a bestseller list.”

Jack Herer was born in New York City on June 18, 1939, served in the Army in Korea, and by the early 1970s was working on the California Marijuana Initiative when his friend, a man he called 'Captain' Ed Adair, gave him an assignment: start keeping notes about everything he learned about hemp and cannabis.

Herer was not an academic. He was not a scientist or a librarian. He was, by most accounts, a passionate autodidact with enormous energy and limited formal methodology, which is both the strength and the limitation of the book he eventually produced.

For twelve years, beginning in 1973, he visited government archives, requested documents through the precursors to FOIA, clipped newspapers, read trade publications, and assembled a file of primary documents that constituted the most comprehensive lay research project in the history of cannabis advocacy. The USDA's own records. Congressional testimony. Popular Mechanics. The DEA's seizure statistics. The USPTO patent filings.

The first edition appeared in 1985, self-published. It sold through cannabis-adjacent bookstores, head shops, and mail order. By the time the twelfth edition was published in November 2010, shortly after Herer's death, the book had sold over 800,000 copies. It had never appeared on a mainstream bestseller list. It had never been reviewed by the New York Times. It didn't need to be. The audience that needed it found it.

Herer's genius was not analytical, it was archival and rhetorical. He assembled government documents that contradicted the government's stated position and made the contradiction vivid. The USDA's 1942 'Hemp for Victory' film. The Popular Mechanics 1938 'billion dollar crop' article. The Congressional testimony from 1937 in which no medical expert testified and the legislation passed in two hours. He did not need to construct an argument from these documents. The documents made the argument themselves.

He dubbed himself the 'Emperor of Hemp' and traveled the country staffing information booths and giving speeches. The persona was deliberate: if the emperor wore no clothes, the person saying so needed to be willing to be loud about it.

Sources

• Wikipedia, The Emperor Wears No Clothes
• Cannabis company web page, Jack Herer Legacy (2026)
• Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes (1985)