August 2026: Member Spotlight - Barbara LaRonde

This month we're shining our spotlight on Sister Barbara LaRonde, cannabis consultant and educator, community activist, entertainment manager and producer, radio personality, and one of the most persistent voices behind the Virgin Islands' hemp and cannabis movement. Her mission is simple to state and hard to execute: make sure local people aren't shut out of an industry that's about to change the territory's economy.

Sister B spent a decade campaigning for the legislation that finally arrived in January, signed into law as one of Governor Albert Bryan's first acts after years of legislative back and forth. Former Senator Positive Nelson, now Agriculture Commissioner, carried the bill through the legislature. Sister B carried the education campaign that ran alongside it.

She didn't just study the industry from a distance. For two and a half years, she split her time between California and Jamaica, working every angle of the business, from planting to dispensing. She was a chef, a trimmer, and a farm manager. Her reasoning was straightforward: "Nobody could tell me I didn't know what I was talking about."

That homework showed up on full display at "Inna Cannabis World," the daylong event she organized at Hull Bay to jump-start local understanding of the industry. It wasn't a rally. It was an education session, and that distinction matters to Sister B more than almost anything else.

Ask Sister B what the hemp industry means for the Virgin Islands and she won't just talk about farms. She rattles off garden supplies, transportation, graphic design, label manufacturing, grow lights, photography, and security systems, all businesses that spring up around cultivation and all opportunities for Virgin Islanders if the territory builds the industry right from the start.

But opportunity comes with responsibility, and Sister B doesn't let that part slide. "If it's your medicine, you've got to take it seriously," she said, pointing to the need for real testing and honest labeling. She's watched a friend manage colon cancer symptoms with a very specific plant strain, and that kind of precision is exactly why she pushes so hard on education. Get the strain wrong, and you're not helping anyone.

The University of the Virgin Islands is already positioned to help on that front. Its laboratory, partnered with the Agriculture Department under the new legislation, will handle the research, testing, and market development the industry needs to grow responsibly.

Sister B doesn't use the word "recreational." Her framework is medicinal, industrial, and sacramental, and in that order. Her first priority is making sure people who need CBD oil and similar products for medical reasons have access to something locally produced, tested, and trustworthy.

The numbers back up why that matters. A pharmaceutical-grade CBD product, Epidiolex, runs about $2,700 a month and treats seizures using the same active ingredient Sister B wants Virgin Islanders growing and processing themselves. National surveys suggest more than a quarter of U.S. adults have tried CBD, and roughly three quarters support legalizing medical marijuana. The demand is real and it's not going anywhere.

Sister B expects the "medicine cabinet" to fully open about a year after the legislation took effect, since a full growing season has to happen first. Licensing fees, though, are expected to start generating revenue for the territory well before that.

Sister B's work sits alongside a broader wave of agricultural organizing happening across St. Thomas this year, from the St. Thomas Farm Irrigation Workshop at the Bordeaux Farmers' Market, hosted by Black Sustainability, Inc. and We Grow Food, Inc., to We Grow Food's monthly Last Sunday Farmers Market. Different initiatives, same throughline: building food and plant systems that belong to the community, not around it.

We Grow Food, Inc., founded in 1993, has spent over three decades working toward that same goal, replanting Caribbean fruits and vegetables, bringing agriculture into Virgin Islands classrooms, and working to reclaim hundreds of acres in Estate Bordeaux as an agricultural zone. Sister B's push for a homegrown, locally controlled hemp industry fits squarely into that same legacy of land, self-sufficiency, and generational knowledge.

Sister B didn't wait for permission to become an expert. She built her credibility the hard way, plant by plant, harvest by harvest, so that when the Virgin Islands finally passed its cannabis legislation, someone was already standing there ready to make sure the community didn't get left behind.

That's the kind of member energy worth celebrating.

Watch Sister Barbara LaRonde's feature, "The Welcome Mat: Time to Legalize," on PBS: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-welcome-mat-time-to-legalize-ztpybr/