by Lucas Indrikovs Photo by Emily Eizen T he founder of Cu- linary & Cannabis didn’t wait for the industry to make room for her. She built her own. For decades, cannabis was a weapon. A pretext for prejudice, a set of hand- cuffs dressed up as pub- lic safety, a battering ram through the front doors of Black and Brown homes. The communities that got hit hardest by that weapon are the same ones the legal Tamara Anderson Is Not Here to Ask Permission
industry now courts with marketing budgets and influencer campaigns, while the damage done and the dollars chased exist in the same breath, with almost no reckoning in between. Most people who understood what that weapon did stayed the hell away from anything connected to it, but Tamara Anderson walked straight toward it—RN badge and pastry knife in hand—and de- cided to turn the whole damn thing inside out. Before she was running luxury cannabis wellness events across Southern Califor- nia. Before shipping DIY topical kits to pandemic-locked strangers who needed something to do with their hands besides washing them in fear. Before command- ing rooms at Grammy Week with CBD massages and trauma-informed healing conversations— She was watching people get sick. Not from cannabis. Sick from the medi- cine that was supposed to help them. Eleven years on the administrative and financial side of healthcare before nurs- ing school, watching insurance adjust-
ers decide who got cared for and who deserved to rust on the wrong side of a deductible. Anderson watched, up close, what long-term pharmaceutical “treat- ments” actually did to a human body. In some cases, that was liver damage or addiction, even changes in personality. The slow, grinding cost of being managed rather than healed. “From the very start of my nursing ca- reer,” Anderson says, “it has been my mission to change the way we approach healthcare.” She tried to change it from inside the system first. But she quickly realized, somewhere between the machinery and the bureaucracy, the human element got swallowed up whole. It always does. Systems aren’t built acci- dentally. So Anderson did what you do when someone decides you’re not worthy of a seat at their table. She built her own table. And made it beautiful enough that people cross state lines for a seat ... Continue reading at HighTimes.com
28 MARCH/APRIL 2026
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