Customer Reviews

Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy: The Emperor Wears No Clothes

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I was so moved by this book that I wanted to speak to the author.
Moved even more by the story of why Jack continues his quest to supply the facts.
I now purchase random copies of any Emperor release and give them to people less likely to read this material.
I believe that everyone capable of understanding the environmental issues facing mankind, should have this book on their required reading list.
Each new release just exhibits the information and facts that much better.
Someday this information could very well be as crucial to us as the bible.
I can't wait for the 1998 updated.
Special Thanks, to Jack and his associates and research assistants, and especially to Jack's friend to whom he promised to continue their mutual quest to enlighten the world about this conveniently unspoken conspiracy.

This book is a very usefull book to anyone who has ever lived in america long enough to know some scholar is full of it. And maybe just maybe if enough people realize that the real drug problem is not the drugs . But ITS ignorance torwards the truth, People who who care about this planet and the reality of the situation, should know is the worst thing, and the only way you will die is if you are one of the lucky 750,000 americans are arrested for marijuana every year. While people can say all sorts of HORRIBLE things about it, THEY probably CANT PROVE IT, And if the could, the negative would not out weigh the positive. Jack CAN AND has proved that no one has ever died from smoking or eating it, or ever will after the end of its much needed and long overdue. And not to mention the undeniably the worst EIGHTY YEARS of prohibation of lies for money (no one wants that right) and money and more money.
ITS TIME FOR THE THE DESTRUCTION TO STOP, HELP SAVE YOUR PLANET IF YOU REALLY DO CARE AT ALL ABOUT LIFE IN GENERAL[!]

The Authoritative Historical Record of the Cannabis Plant, Marijuana Prohibition, & How Hemp Can Still Save The World. Updated & Expanded 1995 Edition, 10th printing. Includes: Uses of Hemp, The Last Days of Legal Cannabis, Medical Literature on Marijuana, The Sociology of Cannabis Use, Prejudice & Marijuana, Half Century of Suppression, Debunking Gutter Science, and much, much more. The historical and present day importance of this book cannot be overstated. This is an amazing book. If this information is new to you, it could change your life forever! An invaluble reference tool for anyone interested in the hemp and marijuana plants. The Best Book Catalog In The World gives this book their very highest rating. I would have to agree. Read it myself time, after time, cover to cover. The Bible of honest information about marijuana. The polar opposite of what you will hear from most government officials. Interestingly, "The view of scholars" review below offers no alternative research materials for hemp or cannabis. Could it be that the anonymous reviewer is an anti-pot zealot? Herer does not, "Suddenly reclassify smoked marijuana as food." Cannabis, when eaten, is a food. Duh!...Cannabis prohibition is no more moral than alcohol prohibition. Legalize! Large softcover, 260 pages.

It's hard to know where to begin with this book. The author's claims about the medical / health issues concerning marijuana are contradicted by the AMA's own journal and similar medical publications, which have numerous articles proving the harmful effects of marijuana and opposing its "medicinal" use; the book's "history" section is largely fictional; in the sections on industrial hemp the author ignores the fact that we already have organic substances for all the uses which he suggests for hemp, and throughout the book he deliberately tries to blur the distinction between industrial (non-narcotic) hemp and (narcotic) marijuana - two different variations of the same plant, as even pro-hemp sources emphasize; the author then includes the industrial uses of the former as an argument for legalizing both. To cover but a few points:
1) Concerning history - Just as a sample of the numerous deliberate distortions: No allegation of drug use was ever made at Joan of Arc's trial: you won't find it in the transcript nor in any of the eyewitness accounts. Similarly, the book tries to turn the War of 1812 into a "hemp war", whereas it was primarily fought over British maritime policies, disputes over the Northwest Territories, and so forth. Every historical subject imaginable - from the Inquisition to bookmaking to warship construction - is rewritten to serve the author's purposes.
2) Concerning the medical issues - Here are some samples of what the medical literature actually says about marijuana: articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association and other such publications, by researchers such as Keith Green, Nadia Solowij, Robert S. Stephens, Roger A. Roffman, etc, have cited studies showing the damage to brain function that results from marijuana use; the toxic effects of marijuana on the body; evidence of physical dependence; and recommendations against using marijuana (especially the smoked form) for medicinal use - a point which has been echoed by a great many doctors who have denounced the use of so-called "medical marijuana clubs", sometimes comparing it to a policy of sending patients to heroin dens rather than giving them medically-prepared morphine (it must be remembered that medically-approved THC has long been available in tablet form, and a spray form is either available now or will be soon, undermining the claims that medically-useful THC can "only" be obtained from marijuana use). Studies conducted by the Jonsson Cancer Center and other institutions have found that marijuana smoke contains more carcinogens than even tobacco smoke, made still worse by THC's known tendency to encourage cancerous tumor growth. A recent IOM report rejected the popular notion that marijuana is useful in treating glaucoma, Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease. Researchers at the Symposium on Cannabinoids (La Grande Motte, France, 23-25 July 1998) cited research showing that marijuana's active ingredient weakens the immune system, meaning (among other things) that it could actually harm AIDS patients rather than helping them, by further crippling their already weakened immune response; long-term cannabis users experience marked impairment to the crucial frontal lobe of the brain; studies have shown that physical addiction does in fact occur with marijuana usage. The list can go on.
Similarly, Herer's claims about the significance of THC's interaction with receptor sites is profoundly ignorant: after all, heroin happens to interact with opioid receptors, and yet no sane person would make Herer-style claims about heroin. While we're at it, arsenic affects the glucocorticoid receptor. This is by accident, not "design", and THC has now been proven to merely have an accidental ability to bind with receptors designed for anandamide.
3) Concerning the industrial applications of hemp: the author merely cites various uses which other organic-based materials already fill - from corn-based Ethanol to soy-based products - meaning that his grandiose claim that hemp is the "only one" that can solve environmental problems is ludicrous. The notion that hemp is the next miracle food crop is on a par with the 1980s hype regarding the potential use of algae and seaweed as the next staple foods. Additionally, the tired conspiracy theory regarding the various plots against industrial hemp ignores the crux of the current debate, which centers around concerns by law enforcement that legalizing hemp would make enforcement of marijuana laws difficult (which is apparently Herer's main goal). Ironically, some pro-hemp organizations that oppose marijuana use are now working with law enforcement to provide easy methods of distinguishing between the two plants, thereby providing a way to keep marijuana illegal while still allowing the legal cultivation of industrial (i.e., non-narcotic) hemp. I wonder if Herer would still promote the latter if its legalization would not impact anti-marijuana laws?
4) Herer has trotted out arguments by people such as Terrence McKenna (and similar authors) on the alleged use of marijuana by "virtually all religions", even those which actually forbid the use of any mind-altering substance; he then tries to claim that this is the view taken by "virtually all" researchers. Drug activists like McKenna and the pop authors who quote from such people are not the same as reputable scholars [such as Spiros Zodhiates, Warren Baker, Henry Halley, etc]: no translator or reputable scholar would support the claims made in this book about the Bible's alleged 'promotion' of pot usage, nor similar notions about its use by the ancient Jews and so forth.
The problem with Herer's approach, on numerous subjects, is that he tends to read only those authors who take the view that he wants to believe, and then tries to claim that such is promoted by the medical or academic community as a whole, while inventing fiction to fill the many gaps in his knowledge. The book is marketed as "authoritative", when in truth it's not even accurate.

Historians strongly disagree with this book's claim to be an "authoritative historical" work: there is very little 'history' here. As a researcher myself, I would make the following brief comments on a mere handful of the book's distortions to serve as examples: 1) There was no accusation of cannabis possession or other drug usage in the trial of Joan of Arc: the transcript of that trial is one of those which I myself have translated from the original manuscripts, and no such charge is listed anywhere in either set of articles against her (not in the initial 70 articles nor in the final 12), nor was it ever mentioned in the course of the trial; the author simply made that up. There was never any suggestion that she used cannabis to produce her "voices": instead, her judges claimed (in Article XI of the final set) that the beings which she identified as angels and saints might be fallen angels instead. 2) The oft-cited claim that the presence of "unique" THC receptors is evidence of some sort of crucial link between human evolution and pot usage shows a profound misunderstanding of the way such receptors work: they do not typically bind only with a single "unique" substance, and in fact one of the receptors which reacts to THC is the same one which also reacts to heroin and similar opiates as well as to substances within the body called endorphins, which the receptor was specifically designed for; opiates and THC happen to bind with this receptor for much the same reason that arsenic and other poisons happen to interact with certain sites in the body. Presumably, we will now have to deal with the claim that the body was designed to consume arsenic, too. 3) Medieval books were expensive because they had to be painstakingly hand-written (and later, printed using a clumsy and laborious process), not because of any ban against paper, hemp-based or otherwise. This should hardly need to be said. 4) While the author is correct in saying that the ancient Scythians (for example) did use a cannabis-based drug (hashish), there seems to be a persistent attempt to add other ancient cultures to the list by deliberately mistranslating words such as the Chinese "ma" (which means "flax"), or to confuse non-narcotic uses of hemp with narcotic uses of cannabis, or to mistranslate certain Hebrew words in order to claim that early Jews and Christians were drug users, too. 4) In another obvious gaff, the book tries to claim that the Bible (of all things) supports pot usage by deliberately misinterpreting certain English translations (such as the one which uses an archaic definition of the word "herb" to translate Hebrew words such as "zara'on", which means "vegetable"), or by taking out of context Paul's comments about Jewish dietary laws (which banned certain meats, such as pork, which were common in the Greek-speaking world in which Paul was trying to win converts; hence the statement that any "creature" or "animal" ("ktisma" in the Greek version of the original manuscripts) is valid for consumption. Marijuana is not an "animal", although I've literally seen people try to argue that it somehow qualifies as such in order to support the author's views on this particular subject). A similar argument is invoked when dealing with a passage preaching against the outlawing of foods, with smoked marijuana suddenly being reclassified as a "food" in this case so the claim can be made that the Bible is hostile to current drug laws, all the while ignoring the passages which specifically forbid people to be under the influence of any narcotic substance. The list can go on.

It's hard to know what to say in summary to a book like this: as many scholars have pointed out, it's little more than fiction and fluff, and certainly does not qualify as "history" in any sense of the term.