Sara Brittany Somerset
Title: U.N. Bureau Chief for the Cannabis Desk
After nearly 20 years in cannabis, Sara Brittany Somerset is still fighting for legalization, for normalization and for the yet unrealized potential of medical cannabis.
“My passion for the plant has never wavered,” she says. “I really don’t think I can rest until I see cannabis legal worldwide. We live in a time where people are getting sent to jail for cannabis and they’re getting longer and harsher sentences than child molesters or murderers. It makes no sense whatsoever. So I feel like as long as we have this disparity, there’ll always be work for me to do.”
During her career, Somerset, who has a Ph.D. in crisis communications, has been — and still is — a journalist, a photographer, a publicist, a consultant, a drug policy analyst, and an activist. She was “fractional” before the title became trendy, often working for multiple companies or publications simultaneously.
“Some people do their day job and that is the one thing they do. And I’ve never been that type of person,” she says. “I’ve always had to do multiple things at once. I’ve always liked to have many irons in many fires.”
She’s a natural-born connector, because she’s well-connected throughout the world, and she’s just as comfortable interviewing a farmer who’s risked his freedom for growing cannabis as she is the obstinate foreign diplomat who maintains the stance that cannabis is dangerous.
She started her career as a reporter for High Times in 2007, gaining acclaim for her first big story about the unregulated cannabis trade during Sierra Leone’s blood diamond wars. In 2011, she established the first (and still the only) cannabis news bureau at the United Nations to cover and influence drug policy discussions on the global level.
On the communications front, she’s selective about who she takes on as a client, working with companies like Blazy Susan and, previously, five years as the chief communications officer for the psychedelics biopharma company, Cybin.
She also wants to spend more time on philanthropy and impact work. She recently partnered with Humanity Heroes to ship 100 backpacks to a primary school in Jamaica that was impacted by the hurricane.
“I feel like my unofficial role is cannabis fixer,” she says. “It kind of evolved into ‘tell me what your cannabis problem is and let me see how I can solve it for you.’ Whether that’s a supply chain issue, whether that’s connecting them with the right social media manager, whether it’s trying to work around advertising bans on social media. I guess I’ve become a de facto cannabis fixer in the industry through my years and years of international connections.”
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