See Grant on this year’s Aaron Swartz Day 2024 Podcast,  discussing Jury Trials in the Age of Social Media.

Grant Smith Ellis is the editor of GrantSmithEllis.com (NECANN 2021 award winner for Best News and Information Source) and a grassroots cannabis activist working in Massachusetts, and throughout the country, to break up corporate cannabis corruption with the aim of creating pathways to market access for local companies owned by those who were most disproportionately impacted by a decades long drug war.

Grant was studying towards a graduate degree in political philosophy at Boston College (where he was a Double Eagle) in 2014 when he fell seriously disabled following complications from a surgery. His graduate work focused on developing a quantitative methodology to examine the cogency of public discourse as an indicator of political legitimacy within representative democracies (in particular through the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP).

After falling disabled, Grant was introduced to cannabis by his doctor following an 18 month period wherein he was in and out of the hospital. As a result of his positive experiences with medical cannabis, Grant became involved with grassroots cannabis activism by way of volunteering for a wide variety of organizations in his local cannabis space where he was grateful to be able to assist with anything from multimedia technology to regulatory policy development or otherwise. That hands-on experience allowed Grant to “live” the work that his graduate thesis had originally framed in a theoretical context, something for which he is eternally grateful.

That series of events also led Grant to, eventually, become the President of the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition (a position he has now left) and to begin editing his own publication related to legislative and regulatory updates surrounding the emergencing cannabis market.

Grant can be reached on most social media platforms @GrantSmithEllis

 

See Grant’s 2022 talk: “Cannabis and Social Equity; Weaponizing the Overton Window to Beat Agents of Corporate Regulatory Capture.“

See Grant’s 2021 talk:“Regulatory Trust Busting and Enabling Equity-owned Legal Cannabis Businesses.”