NORMLIZER

Last September, the cannabis movement mourned the passing of a business icon and a major supporter of hemp. Dame Anita Roddick, the founder of the revolutionary retail chain the Body Shop, was famous worldwide for her business acumen, trend-spotting skills and conscious capitalism. But relatively few knew that Anita was also one of the first major business leaders to wholeheartedly embrace one of the planet’s most useful—and wrongly maligned—plant species.

Anita played a crucial behind-the-scenes role as an able matchmaker, mediator and facilitator. A few months after receiving a copy of Jack Herer’s seminal The Emperor Wears No Clothes, she aggressively introduced an entire cosmetic line at the Body Shop derived from hemp. These products—which, for the first time, introduced women en masse to the promise and benefits of hemp—were well received by the Body Shop’s mainly female clientele. To this day, hemp products remain popular items at the stores.

The public-relations campaign for the Body Shop’s hemp line was breathtaking, with virtually every major magazine and newspaper in the spring of 1998 carrying provocative and humorous full-page ads touting the virtues of hemp and the ways it differs from marijuana. The Body Shop chain became, in effect, a global billboard for the legalization of hemp. (Though this was not without some controversy: In Sweden and France, government officials tried to shut down stores that advertised the products.)

Not content to rest with her company’s efforts to popularize hemp, Anita provided the funding for what she hoped would be the breakthrough documentary that would alert and educate the world about hemp. This was The Emperor of Hemp—a film about the life and times of Jack Herer. And when right-wing newspapers attacked then-President Clinton for consuming a Hempen Ale on Air Force One, claiming that Clinton was left-handedly endorsing marijuana, Anita wrote the president an impassioned letter in defense of hemp and encouraged him to end, once and for all, the federal government’s prohibition on American farmers cultivating industrial hemp.

Finally, when numerous organizations working on medical access to cannabis were fighting among themselves and wasting precious resources, Anita—along with the Drug Policy Alliance’s Ethan Nadelmann—convened multi-day retreats in Santa Barbara to encourage movement leaders to put aside their differences and work for the common good. The results: one of the most productive periods in the history of cannabis-law reform, from 1998 to 2002, with Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and the District of Columbia adopting legal protections for medical-cannabis patients.

Allen St. Pierre, Executive Director of NORML
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