About the Author

Richard M. Davis Freedom Fighter, Feb. '95 High Times Magazine Richard M. Davis is the founder and curator of the FIRST Virtual Traveling Hemp Museum. The USA Hemp Museum, both the Traveling Museum and the resource website www.hempmuseum.org teaches the benefits of Cannabis/Hemp, as a medicine, as an industrial resource and for the private use by adults. There is also a private museum in my home brimming with exhibits in Los Angeles, California. An Arizona native, Davis graduated high school in Willcox, Arizona, joined the Air Force from Arizona, and was arrested for the first time in Arizona at the age of fifty-five on hemp related charges. Davis holds a Masters Degree in Biology from California State University at Los Angeles, and attended the School of Public Health at UCLA for four years under a US Public Health Service Fellowship. Davis has lived surrounded by hemp for forty years, the vast majority of his life. His introduction to hemp came, like that of many in his generation, from hemp smoke. He was refused the request to study the effects of pot at the School of Public Health at U.C.L.A., in 1972, where he was working on a doctorate in Public Health. He studied zoology (B.S.) and biology (M.A.), and loved the great outdoors. He took a leave of absence and never went back. After a dozen years in the mountains on a small farm, Davis ran for Congress in a democratic primary as an admitted pot grower. Several years later when the U.S. Army invaded that area in operation Greensweep, he found out about hemp from Jack Herer's book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, and started the Hemp Museum, with help of course. We were first the Mendocino Mobile Marijuana Museum, a knock at the government that wants to call hemp the marijuana word in law, when it does not apply. With two card tables and one hemp shirt, we passed out literature to hundreds of Capitol employees and elected officials on the benefits of legal hemp and hemp medicines. When the virtual museum started, much of the site had to do with Davis' trial in Arizona. The virtual museum now contains more than 1,700 picture files and 18 virtual rooms, dealing with hemp in history, agriculture, textiles, plastics, medicine, rope, etc.