Ellen Komp has been a hemp/marijuana activist since 1991. She began in Los Angeles where she helped plan quarterly hemp rallies and volunteered for LA NORML after being elected to the California NORML board of directors in 1992. She edited the 9th edition of The Emperor Wears No Clothes by Jack Herer and was a volunteer petitioner for the California Hemp Initiative (1993, 1994) and Proposition 215 (1995).
Ellen served on the San Luis Obispo County Drug and Alcohol Advisory Board and co-founded The 215 Reporter, the first journal covering California’s medical marijuana law and its aftermath. She was a Program Associate at The Lindesmith Center in San Francisco (now Drug Policy Alliance) and in 2001 was named High Times’s Freedom Fighter of the Month. In 2002, She moved to Humboldt County where she worked for the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project in Garberville, and sat on the Humboldt County medical marijuana task force, resulting in a county ordinance to implement SB420.
Ellen is currently Deputy Director of California NORML. She manages the website VeryImportantPotheads and in 2015 she published Tokin’ Women: A 4,000-Year Herstory.