The Emperor Wears No Clothes

by Jack Herer

Phony Paraquat Kits

During the 1978 Mexican marijuana paraquat scare, and while still a private citizen working for the state of Mississippi marijuana farm, this same Carlton Turner called High Times magazine to advertise a paraquat tester. Unknown to Turner, High Times was not accepting ads for any paraquat testers because all evidence showed the testers didn’t work.

Dean Latimer then a High Times associate editor, strung Turner along in virtually daily phone conversations for a month, listening to Turner talk about how much money Turner was going to make from sales of the device.

High Times wanted to see a sample. When Turner delivered his prototype version of the paraquat test kit to High Times, it was a total “Rube Goldberg” type rip-off, “just like the dozen or so phony kits other companies tried to buy ad space for at this time,” wrote Latimer in an article published in 1984.

Turner apparently never thought High Times was ethical enough to check the contraption out. He assumed they would just take the ad money and run print the ad and make Turner rich.

He didn’t care if some kid died or was bilked out of money believing in his bogus paraquat test kit.

After this attempted mail fraud, this man became President Reagan’s national drug czar in 1981, recommended by George Bush and Nancy Reagan.