The Emperor Wears No Clothes

by Jack Herer

A Popular Inspiration of the 19th Century Literary Greats

From the early 1800s on, some of the world’s foremost romantic and revolutionary writers on individual freedom and human dignity extolled cannabis use. We study their works in school today as “classics”: Victor Hugo: Les Miserables, 1862, Notre Dame de Paris (Hunchback of), 1831; Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo, 1844, The Three Musketeers, 1844; Coleridge, Cautier, De Quincy, Balzac, Baudelaire, and John Greenleaf Whittier (Barbara Fritchie), etc.

Cannabis and mushroom imagery influenced Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, 1865, and Through the Looking Glass, 1872. In the early 1860s, Mark Twain’s best friend and mentor was the already-famous best-selling writer and advocate of cannabis, the young (mid-20s) Fitz Hugh Ludlow (The Hashish Eater, 1857). Ludlow extolled hashish eating as a wondrous mind adventure but warned strongly against over-indulgence of it and all drugs.

These authors’ stories usually had several things in common: A complete love of individual freedom; respect for the dignity of each human’s search for individual consciousness; and humorous contempt for the establishment, beliefs, bureaucracies, and injustices of their day (for example, Les Miserables).

The science of psycho-pharmacology started in France circa 1845 with Doctor J.J. Moreau DeTours, and cannabis became one of the first drugs used to treat the insane and depressed.

Moreau was best friends with Dumas, Hugo, and Gautier, and in 1845 co-founded with them in Paris the first cannabis club in the Western World: Le Club Des Haschischins.