I’ve been thinking about liberty and the pursuit of happiness lately.  

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It’s our birthright as Americans, written into the Declaration of Independence. Over the past several decades, we have increasingly pursued happiness in prescription pill bottles. With more than 70 percent of adults taking at least one prescription drug, Americans are now the most medicated people on earth. Thirteen percent of all Americans, including one in four adult women, now take some form of antidepressant or anti-anxiety drug.

Social media shutdowns have become a hazard in the legal cannabis industry. In recent months major companies — Oakland’s Harborside Health Center, the social network MassRoots, Boulder retailer The Farm, and the Denver-based edibles makers Dixie and Incredibles — have had their Facebook and Instagram accounts shut down without notice...

I’m often asked to speak on the future of cannabis. It’s not an easy subject to grasp. Change is so fast and relentless in the cannabis industry, it’s hard to know what’s going to happen next month, let alone next year.

This coming weekend I’ll be pondering the path ahead at Further Future, a music, lifestyle, and ideas festival that blooms for just one weekend in the desert outside Las Vegas. 

To prepare for the weekend, I spent a couple days earlier this month at the Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) annual conference in Washington, D.C. If you want to know the future of drug policy reform, there is no better place to go...

“This looks like one of my concerts!”

That was Melissa Etheridge’s reaction to the crowd of 1,400 women (and men) rocking the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in Denver last month. Etheridge was the keynote speaker at our second annual Women Grow Leadership Summit, and she killed it with a performance that combined personal stories — like how David Crosby reintroduced her to cannabis after her breast cancer diagnosis — with a stirring call to action. “It’s now time for us to run the business,” she said. “We can create our own corporations.” A lot of the women in the audience already had — and many more will...

I became Jane West to prove that I could change my life in a monumental way. I realized that I was the person holding me back from seeking out the bigger and better. 

Jane is my nom de plume of pot, adopted because I needed to take a leap out of my former professional career. That I did, head first...