Strong voices in a growing industry.

From activism and medicine to business, grow culture, and style: women didn't just enter cannabis—they have long been co-authors of the scene.

Cannabis culture was never just male. It was just portrayed, sold, and told that way for a long time.

Grow rooms, cups, Cali-hype, complex strain names, dealer myths, rap aesthetics, headshop clichés, high-THC races, business pitches, gram counts, and loud claims: for decades, visible cannabis culture often had a male tone. Not exclusively, but dominant enough to create a distorted image.

Because while cannabis often appeared to the public as a playground for men, women were already at the heart of it: as activists, patients, doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, growers, journalists, founders, mothers, consumers, networkers, culture-makers, and quiet experts.

They didn't just discover cannabis when the market became more professional. They were already there when cannabis was even more criminalized, stigmatized, and politically uncomfortable.

Before the market came care

One of the most important figures in modern medical cannabis history was not an investor, not an influencer, and not a classic industry manager. She was an older woman with a baking sheet.

Mary Jane Rathbun, better known as Brownie Mary, became a symbolic figure of the medical cannabis movement in San Francisco. She was active in the 1980s and 1990s supporting AIDS patients, distributing cannabis brownies, working as a volunteer at San Francisco General Hospital, and fighting alongside activists like Dennis Peron for medical access to cannabis. Her commitment is linked to San Francisco Proposition P and California Proposition 215, which enabled medical cannabis in California in 1996.

Brownie Mary is so important because she tells a different cannabis story.

Not the story of a lifestyle product.
Not the story of quick business.
Not the story of rebellious consumption alone.

But the story of illness, care, risk, empathy, and direct assistance.

She was arrested, charged, publicly debated, and yet became a kind of grandmother figure of the medical cannabis movement. Her history shows: cannabis activism was never just protest. Sometimes it was care under conditions where the state was not yet ready to look.

Prohibition affected women differently

Prohibition didn't make cannabis disappear. It only determined who had to bear the risks.

For women, this risk was often coded differently. A man with a joint was quickly read as a rebel, stoner, dealer, or scene type. A woman with cannabis was additionally evaluated through other social images: mother, patient, partner, irresponsible, unserious, too visible, too free.

This was particularly evident in medical cannabis. Women appeared not only as consumers, but also as caregivers, patients, relatives, organizers, and political voices. Nevertheless, their roles were often told less loudly than those of male activists, founders, or scene figures.

Cannabis history is therefore also a history of who was seen—and who did the work in the background.

Prohibition doesn't make a plant invisible. It just makes certain people more vulnerable.

Germany: Women between medicine, law, and the industry

In Germany, too, cannabis has long been more than just a male story.

In the medical cannabis sector, Anna-Sophia Kouparanis represents a new generation of German cannabis entrepreneurs. She is a co-founder of the Bloomwell Group and founded Ilios Santé GmbH, a wholesale company for medical cannabis. Industry media describe her as the first woman in Germany to have founded a licensed cannabis wholesale business.

Kouparanis is interesting because her role does not fit the old cannabis cliché. She stands for medical cannabis, telemedicine, pharmaceutical standards, investor logic, and the professionalization of an industry that hung for a long time between activism, pharmacies, and stigma.

Another important German voice is Lisa Haag. She has been active in the cannabis industry since 2017 and founded MJ Universe GmbH in 2018, which works as a publisher, consulting, and networking structure along the hemp and cannabis value chain.

Lisa Haag is particularly relevant for this article because she represents more than just business. Her work sits exactly at the interface of industry, knowledge, networking, female perspective, and public perception. She demonstrates: those who want to change cannabis culture don't just have to sell products. They must create spaces, language, and networks.

Lana Korneva, co-founder and managing director of Drapalin Pharmaceuticals, also belongs in this context. She represents a side of the cannabis industry that is often less visible: import, pharmaceutical standards, logistics, quality, and regulation. Behind the visible market are supply chains, permits, quality processes, pharmaceutical law, patient safety, and European regulation. Women are shaping development there as well.

The legal side: Prohibition is not a law of nature

Anyone talking about women in cannabis culture should not only speak about founders. Law, science, and drug policy are also part of it.

In Germany, Dr. Nicole Krumdiek is an important legal voice in the cannabis-related prohibition discourse. The German Hemp Association refers to her book The national and international legal foundations of cannabis prohibition in Germany; the Schildower Kreis lists her as a member and classifies her in the context of drug policy debates.

This is a decisive point: cannabis was not only changed by culture and the market, but also by people who questioned the legal foundations of prohibition.

Visibility does not only arise at trade fairs or on social media. It also arises in expert opinions, hearings, technical texts, court debates, and political work.

Visibility does not equal power

Today, women are more visible in the cannabis industry than they used to be. But visibility is not automatically power.

It is not enough for women to sit on panels, adorn campaigns, or appear in brand imagery. What matters is who controls capital. Who holds licenses. Who owns companies. Who makes decisions. Who gets access to networks, investors, and political policymaking.

Cannabis was illegal for a long time. Then it was regulated. Now it is being commercialized. In each of these phases, the same question arises anew:

Who is allowed to participate — and who profits from it?

International: Wanda James and the question of equity

In the US, Wanda James shows why women in cannabis culture talk not just about gender, but also about race, class, law enforcement, and access to ownership.

James is considered the first Black woman to have owned a cannabis dispensary in the US. She is a veteran, entrepreneur, and political voice; her work is frequently linked to social equity, racialized law enforcement, and the question of who is actually allowed to participate in the market after legalization.

Her example shows: Legalization alone does not automatically make an industry just.

Those who were previously criminalized are not automatically those who later receive licenses, capital, or visibility. Those who bore the risks of a prohibited culture are not automatically those who profit from the legal market.

Cannabis, therefore, cannot be told only as a lifestyle topic. It is also a story of inequality, criminal law, capital, access, and cultural appropriation.

Women as culture makers

Perhaps the most exciting point lies not only in activism or business. It lies in culture.

When different voices tell the story of cannabis, the aesthetic often changes as well. Moving away from purely more THC, more hype, more volume. Moving toward community, style, education, the patient perspective, fashion, wellness, responsibility, materiality, design, care, and nuanced language.

This does not mean that women automatically create a softer cannabis culture. That would be a cliché again. Many women in the scene are loud, radical, analytical, business-minded, political, uncompromising, or technically extremely deep.

But their visibility expands the picture.

Cannabis thus becomes less one-dimensional.

It is not just about buds and numbers. But about the body, the city, medicine, clothing, music, spaces, language, history, origins, power, and style.

Exactly there is where cannabis becomes culturally interesting.

When different voices tell the story of cannabis, it doesn't just change the narrative. It also changes the aesthetic.

Growers, breeders, and quiet expertise

In the grow context, too, women were long underestimated. Not because they weren't there, but because grow culture was frequently staged as masculine: technology, control, performance, yield, potency, records, setup-fetishism.

But cannabis is a plant. And knowledge of plants was historically never exclusively male. Women were and are part of cultivation, selection, medicinal use, varietal knowledge, community experience, and practical transmission.

Especially today, as home growing becomes more visible, the picture here is also changing. Growers are acting more confidently. Not as an exception. But as part of a scene that was more diverse than its old visual language suggested.

Genetics is not just a technical term. Genetics is also culture, selection, taste, memory, and narrative. Whoever selects, curates. And whoever curates, shapes what becomes visible.

Visibility without permission

For many women, cannabis was long associated with a double uncertainty. Not only with legal questions, but also with social scrutiny. Whoever consumed, dealt with cannabis medically, grew it, founded businesses, conducted research, or spoke publicly about the plant often had to explain themselves more than men.

Too much interest? Too visible.
Too professional? Unusual.
Too self-confident? Provocative.
Too relaxed? Unserious.
Too medicinal? Needing explanation.
Too entrepreneurial? Suddenly bold.

Yet cannabis is not a foreign world to which women must first be invited. The plant was always part of knowledge, care, culture, the body, medicine, resistance, enjoyment, and design. Women have used it, defended it, researched it, grown it, told stories about it, and thought it forward — often long before stages, licenses, or clean brand worlds existed for it.

Visibility does not begin only when someone grants it. Women have long helped shape cannabis — often without a stage, without an invitation, and without official recognition.

It means asking questions without making oneself small.
It means building knowledge without having to prove oneself.
It means reading cannabis not just through shame, stigma, or old images.
It means seeing the plant as what it also is: a piece of culture, a piece of history, a piece of self-determination.

Especially after legalization, cannabis culture is beginning to sort itself out anew. Now, it is being decided who becomes visible, who shapes language, who passes on knowledge, who builds brands, who grows, who curates, and who tells the next version of this story.

This new visibility does not need women as decoration. It needs them as voices.

Not because cannabis becomes more female through this. But because cannabis becomes more complete through this.

Visibility can also be marketed

Nevertheless, one should be careful. "Women in Cannabis" can quickly become a marketing category itself.

A few female faces on a stage do not automatically make an industry fairer. Pink packaging does not make a feminist product. A campaign with "female empowerment" does not replace real ownership stakes, fair working conditions, secure patient care, or serious representation.

The more interesting question is therefore not: Are women visible now?

But: What does their visibility really change?

Does it change decisions?
Does it change brand images?
Does it change language?
Does it change access to capital?
Does it change political debates?
Does it change how people talk about consumption, medicine, risk, and culture?

Only then does visibility become more than just a surface.

Why this story is becoming more important now

After legalization, cannabis is being reorganized. What was formerly illegal, semi-tolerated, or subcultural is becoming more visible, more regulated, and more economic. This creates new opportunities — but also new exclusions.

Industries tend to be taken over by those who have capital, contacts, and experience in regulated markets. Historically, these are not always the people who built the culture, bore the risks, or drove the debates.

Precisely for this reason, it is important not to discover women in cannabis culture only now as a new target group.

They were not a target group on the sidelines.
They were part of the story.

Brownie Mary stands for medical necessity and care. Anna-Sophia Kouparanis for German medical cannabis professionalization. Lisa Haag for networking, knowledge work, and the female perspective in the German industry. Lana Korneva for pharmaceutical infrastructure. Nicole Krumdiek for legal engagement with prohibition. Wanda James for equity, ownership, and political visibility.

These names do not make up a complete list. But they open up a different picture.

Cannabis without women is only half the story

Cannabis culture is not just what was visible. It is also what was long overlooked.

It sits in hospital corridors and courtrooms, in pharmacies and grow rooms, in conference rooms and clubs, in activism, fashion, medicine, social equity, family stories, patient reports, business plans, and networks.

Cannabis culture was never just male. It was just told that way for a long time.

Now that cannabis is becoming more visible, a new question arises: Who is writing the next version of this story?

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