One of the most disenfranchised groups in the world are women. Unfortunately, even in the cannabis world, women are still the underdog. In this case many underdogs have come out on top. This is the story of Ellen Komp, the California NORML Deputy Director.
Ellen Komp, has been involved in cannabis and hemp activism since 1991. She started out helping coordinate and plan quarterly cannabis rallies, before she was elected to California NORML Board of Directors in 1992. She also was a volunteer petitioner for California Hemp Initiative in ’93 & ’94, as well as Prop 215 in 1995.
In the years that followed, Ellen served on the San Luis Obispo County Drug and Alcohol Advisory Board. They instructed the county Drug and Alcohol Services agency on community standards and practices. She founded The 215 Reporter, the first journal covering California’s medical cannabis law and it events thereafter.
In 1999, Ellen Komp became a Program Associate at The Lindesmith Center in San Francisco (now Drug Policy Alliance). Being Deputy Director of Community Outreach & Communications, Komp promoted and scheduled conferences and a forum series on drug war issues.
She also sat on various committees at the San Francisco public health department and developed a website to assist attorneys in medical cannabis defenses for the DPA Office of Legal Affairs in Oakland. With so many other achievements under her belt, California and the cannabis industry as a whole has a lot to thank Ellen for.
These days you can find her writing many open-ended cannabis pieces for Cannabis Now, High Times Magazine, Women Grow, and many others. She was even named High Times’s Freedom Fighter of the Month during the year 2001!
I personally want to thank her for being a rock star, as far as being a woman of weed. She is clearly passionate, tenacious and resilient!
