All in Jane's Domain

How Can We Destigmatize Cannabis?

I’ve gone to so many meetings with high-powered executives who say, usually near the end of the meeting, that they’ve never actually tried cannabis. Imagine that in other industries: If Steve Jobs never used a Mac. If Elon Musk never once tried driving a Tesla…

Consuming the Green on St. Patrick’s Day

St. Patrick’s Day is a big deal in my town. Denver hosts the biggest Irish pride parade west of the Mississippi, with horses, stagecoaches, and 10,000 marchers entertaining 200,000 spectators along Blake Street. This year the Riverdance World Tour is playing sold-out shows at the Buell Theatre. Forget about finding a table at Scruffy Murphy’s, the Irish pub on Larimer; you’ll be lucky to make it through the front door...

Trump Transition & Legalization: Your Talking Points

This past election season promted the coining of a new phrase; post-truth politics. Our current political culture is framed largely by appeals to emotion, disconnected from the details of policy and it's relative real-world impact. 

Considering this landscape, it's important to arm yourself with facts that will be helpful in conversations within our community this month, and in our homes this holiday season...

A Visit to the Future of Drug Policy Reform

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...

I’m Just Not Sorry

“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...

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

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...