On this day, 12/21/18, President Trump signed a bill legalizing hemp production in the US. Libertarian hemp activists have fought long and hard for legalization; and no one did more for the cause than Jack Herer, the guy who started the whole hemp movement.
In 1981, Herer was arrested for publicly promoting hemp, via an arcane use of the Sedition Act. He used his time in prison to write The Emperor Wears No Clothes, a virtual encyclopedia of hemp information detailing its benefits, and history, all of which had been long forgotten. It was a bombshell book that horrified government drug policy officials and stimulated a rebirth of the hemp industry. His story is told in the documentary The Emperor of Hemp, available free on YouTube and Amazon Prime.
Jack Herer died in 2010, but by that time his book had sold an incredible 600,000 copies, disseminating far and wide the full truth about the beneficent hemp plant, thereby undermining the curiously obstinate disinformation campaign of the US government. He didn’t live to see his final victory, but no doubt he would be happy to know that others carried on the fight and finished the job.