Dr. Lakisha Jenkins-Samuels

Who is Dr. Lakisha Jenkins-Samuels?

Dr. Lakisha Jenkins-Samuels, Ph.D., RH (AHG), is a Traditional Naturopath, Clinical Herbalist, and research scientist. Her work focuses on pharmacognosy, novel botanical drug discovery, endocannabinoid system research, scientific consulting, public policy, education, and nonprofit leadership. She has spent her life proving that rigor and reverence belong to the same work. What she is building is not a practice but an ecosystem: pharmacognosy and novel botanical drug discovery, endogenous cannabinoid system science, and community-generated evidence, held together by the conviction that dignified care and ancestral knowledge were never meant to be pulled apart.

Is Dr. Lakisha® the same person as Dr. Lakisha Jenkins-Samuels?

Yes. Dr. Lakisha® is the federally registered mark and professional brand used by Dr. Lakisha Jenkins-Samuels, Ph.D., RH (AHG). She also appears publicly as Dr. Lakisha Jenkins. All three names refer to the same person.

Her authority did not begin in an institution. It began at home, with her grandfather, Onie Bass, Sr., an Indigenous herbalist who crafted his own medicine from what the earth gave him and passed it down in blood and breath. He taught her that a plant is medicine, that knowledge of the land is a form of care, and that this knowledge belongs to the people who carry it. She is the keeper of those stories, and she came to the plants first as a mother, because the people she loved needed her to. Her herbalism has never been narrow: it draws on Afro-Caribbean, Indigenous, Native American, Ayurvedic, energetic, and Western traditions.

She is the mother of nine, three of them transitioned: Kiona, Aaron II, and Carlene. She has known the death of a child and built rather than broke. She earned her doctorate in naturopathy while Kiona was in treatment, because in that system, credentials were what earned a mother the right to be heard in the room. The Kiona Foundation carries her firstborn daughter's name, and she made it a research engine rather than a memorial, so that grief would become infrastructure and the families most often failed by the system would be met, for once, as partners in the science meant to serve them. The fullest telling, in her own voice, lives behind the Alkemist Mother membership.

Full professional record: Dr. Lakisha® on LinkedIn.

Peer-reviewed publication: Her 2026 coauthored paper, Lessons learned from an academic and clinical partnership to address barriers and facilitators of cannabis education and practice, is indexed in PubMed under Lakisha Jenkins. She also appears publicly as Dr. Lakisha Jenkins.

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From the field to the framework

For more than 25 years her work has moved across every level where health is decided: the soil, the laboratory, the clinic, the policy table, and the world stage. She founded and led The Farm'acy Agricultural Cooperative, the first Cannabis agricultural cooperative licensed by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, run on a medical model with structured data collection built in from the start. She was a founding board member and the first elected President of the California Cannabis Industry Association, where she sat across from lawmakers and helped shape the state's 2015 medical regulatory framework and the recognition of Cannabis as an agricultural commodity. At the National Cannabis Industry Association she served as a board member and California state representative, and as founding Chair of its Minority Business Council.

Today she serves as Principal Investigator named in the Foundation's prepared research protocol, with current status explained on the research page, and as Chair of TGR Holdings LTD. She chairs the Community Steering Committee of the Global Cannabis and Psychedelics Research Collaboratory at the University of Miami, guiding the integration of community priorities, cultural knowledge, and equity into its research and global dissemination. Her work at the United Nations runs back years. She is Administrative Director and Main Representative to the United Nations for the Ethiopia Africa Black International Congress Church of Salvation (EABICCS), which holds ECOSOC special consultative status. She contributed to the World Health Organization's cannabis rescheduling process and carried EABICCS's work to the High-Level Political Forum, where she helped initiate the organization's signing of a statement supporting science-based scheduling aligned with the World Health Organization's recommendations.

She is a Founding Member of the National Cannabis Nurse Task Force at the University of Miami and sits on the Research Steering Committee of the Global Cannabis and Psychedelics Research Collaboratory. She is a former member of the Jamaica Cannabis Licensing Authority Health and Wellness Committee, a former contributor to ASTM International Committee D37 (2018 to 2022), and a Women Grow First 50 Sponsor.

The reach of the work

The Foundation is one engine of a larger ecosystem she architects, alongside TGR Holdings LTD, the infrastructure company she chairs. The work is global by design. From 2020 to 2022, she served as a Founding Advisory Board Member of the Zimbabwe Industrial Hemp Trust. She has built pharmacognosy and cultivation partnerships in Ghana, carries long ties to Jamaica, and develops international research and cultivation relationships. Letters of intent describe proposed cooperation, not proof of executed programs.

What holds it together

Across the laboratory, the field, the policy table, and the page, the through-line is the one her grandfather handed her. Botanical knowledge is medicine. It belongs to the people. And it deserves to be built into the systems that decide who receives care, not left at their edges. Everything she has founded, survived, and refused to let go of points in that one direction.