The Emperor Wears No Clothes
Cover title. Includes bibliographical references.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
11mentions
10people
2010–2025years
64% recommend36% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You've misunderstood my comment. The War on Drugs created these problems, it is not the solution to them.
We've done it here domestically too at least as far back as Prohibition. Prohibition ended in 33, we banned automatic weapons in 34, add in the racially-motivated disenfranchisement of Irish and Italian immigrants and ghettoization of their communities, and you got an unprecedented level of domestic organized crime and subsequent retroactively justified restriction of civil rights. [0]
The same happened again in the 80s with the Iran-Contra affair. [1]
The same continues to happen in my city and in many other cities every day, justifying racial and immigration-focused discrimination and allowing institutions to extract wealth from poor communities while ensuring their continued generational poverty.
I would recommend checking out Jack Herer's seminal The Emperor Wears No Clothes [2], especially chapters 5, 13 and 14. I'd also look into William Randolph Hearst [3], his involvement in drug prohibition, and the racially-motivated tactics used to make it happen, by first convincing Americans they should be racist against Mexican immigrants and then connecting these "dangerous" Mexican immigrants to cannabis.
Now, we're using fentanyl, etc. as an excuse, when the entire fentanyl trade thrives on the fact that secure, regulated facilities and distribution networks do not exist for many recreational drugs. The failings of the War on Drugs are perpetually used to circularly justify its existence, and it's shameful.
[0] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/gangsters-pr... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca... [2] https://www.jackherer.com/emperor-3/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst#Critic...
- Most places where pot's legalized are getting more tax revenue, and liquor tax revenue is often declining. Seems some folks don't yet know that a) it was originally criminalized for political, not safety reasons, and b) LOTs of people enjoy it.
One interesting book is "The Emperor Wears No Clothes", where they have a well-researched bibliography showing that the invention of the "Hemp Jennie" was the root cause, as it would have dramatically cut into cotton profits. It was the Cotton Lobby that fought hardest for criminalization.
- For more reading on exactly why BigCo wanted cannabis to be illegal, see the book ”The Emperor Wears No Clothes” by Jack Herer: https://jackherer.com/emperor-3/chapter-1/
It is a rather long read, but to summarise, cannabis prohibition has roots in the industrialising 19th century where it could have competed with cotton and wood pulp. It was banned by employing racist imagery to turn people who had never even heard of ”marijuana” against hemp.
- I highly recommend The Emperor Wears No Clothes by the late Jack Herer for a comprehensive insight into the history and reasons for drug prohibition.
It doesn't touch just on the social implications like fueling police states and for-profit prisons while enabling a new form of slave labor, but also largely on the economic and industrial factors which came into play as well.
An old edition available for free online on Herer's website, and there is a link to a more recently updated edition on Amazon.
- Check out Emperor Wears No Clothes by Jack Herer
- Jack Herer's book 'The Emperor Wears No Clothes' highlights this and is the source for a lot of the pro-hemp sentiment. It is also available online, here is a link to the chapter that highlights the paper industry lobbying to make hemp illegal - https://jackherer.com/emperor-3/chapter-4/
