Jack Herer spent nearly three decades trying to convince America that hemp prohibition was never about marijuana at all. This film follows the cannabis activist and author of 'The Emperor Wears No Clothes', the self-published book that became the movement's central text, tracing his argument that hemp was outlawed in the 1930s not for its psychoactive cousin but to protect DuPont's new nylon, Hearst's timber and paper holdings, and the petroleum industry from a plant that could make rope, cloth, paper, and fuel more cheaply. Interviews and archival material lay out Herer's case that Harry Anslinger's Federal Bureau of Narcotics folded hemp into the marijuana scare to serve those business interests, and the film follows Herer himself, still lecturing and handing out pamphlets late in life, as the public face of that claim. The film stays close to Herer's own telling of events rather than bringing in outside historians to weigh the theory, and it ends with the plant's legal status largely unchanged from when he started.