One of her readers is in the Vatican City. She knows because she counted the countries, and there were 207.
Laura Ramos was looking at Google Analytics when she stopped counting.
The dashboard was listing the countries where people were reading CannaReporter, the Portuguese news site she co-founded and edits. She got to a number she did not believe.
"I was like seeing 207. I was like, is it really over 200 countries? Are there 200 countries in the world?"
Some of the names she did not recognise. She went down the list to the end.
"The last one was the Vatican City. So someone, one person only in the Vatican City was reading Canna Reporter."
She has told this story before. It has become the thing she says when people ask why she keeps going.
"If it's only one bishop or the pope, it's already worth it."
She has been a journalist since 1998. For the last eight years she has written about nothing but cannabis.
It was not a plan.
"It just happened in my life. So I wasn't doing journalism anymore at the time. But I had some friends that came to me to ask for help in the communications fields, to help them with press releases, and they were building and creating a cannabis nonprofit association in Portugal."
She had been near the plant for a long time by then. A user since sixteen or seventeen, she says, though never a regular one. "Sometimes I smoke at the parties or with friends, but it's not something that I do every day. But I like cannabis. I like the plant."
Around 2007 there was a first attempt. She and some friends published a free newspaper distributed through grow shops in Portugal.
"That's when I realized that cannabis had the potential to treat diseases or pathologies, or help people with certain health conditions, like cancer. That's when I heard about Rick Simpson, and we wrote about him."
The newspaper stopped. She went on to other work. What stayed was a diagnosis about the coverage itself.
"The information we have is very biased. It's very built on myths, not in facts. And the generalistic press, they are not able to cover the specific subjects of the cannabis industry as an international level."
CannaReporter was the answer to that. A nonprofit, run by volunteers and contributors scattered across the world, with a small number of working journalists and specialists. As editor-in-chief she checks everything before it publishes.
Then the site is machine-translated into seventeen languages.
She is candid about what that costs.
"We cannot verify. It's automatic translation. We cannot verify all the languages. Of course there are flaws. There are errors."
They argued about it internally and decided the reach was worth the imprecision. Taiwan is consistently in their top ten. Japan and Singapore read them. They carry both modern and traditional Chinese.
"It's crazy how with just a tool you can get to the other side of the world."
She became a journalist by trying to escape something else.
At university she enrolled to study English and German. The first year told her she had chosen wrong.
"I didn't really want to dig into the German and the linguistic world. And I decided to check other options. And it was opening a new degree at university, was opening in journalism."
She was already extroverted, already an easy talker. It seemed worth a try.
"What I really wanted to do was to first escape the English and German course. And then I found journalism, and I fell in love with it."
She took the full master's.
Ask her what gets in the way and she does not name money, or governments, or the law. She names a posture.
"People that are not open to listen, or they just don't want to learn anything because they think they already know everything. So I think this is the biggest obstacle."
Then she narrows it to one profession.
"Especially doctors. And I think this is the biggest problem, is that doctors, they are not willing to learn about the medicinal potential of this plant. Because there are people in need that could have so much better quality of life. And they don't, because they don't have a doctor who is open to study, who is open to listen or to read."
She has watched the posture break, repeatedly, and always the same way.
"I have interviewed many doctors and scientists and people that they had no clue. And then they had a patient that was taking CBD, a kid with epilepsy. There are so many stories that repeat all over the world."
The patient does what the argument cannot.
"They changed their minds when patients, they show them their truth and their stories and how much their lives changed. And we are all human. It could be us one day, you know."
On her own country she is specific rather than general.
"Take the example of Portugal. Doctors are not yet having proper education on the endocannabinoid system. Kids as well. Kids in school, they don't have — they study the respiratory system, the nervous system, the circulatory system, and they don't study the endocannabinoid system."
She thinks she knows why.
"Because Portugal invested in the economy of the plant, and they were looking at the money and the possibilities of cultivating a lot of cannabis in Portugal, which we do, and it's very good. But they totally forget about the scientific part."
Her fix is a curriculum, not a campaign.
"They need to at least keep up. If you improve the economy, improve as well the education and the science. Let's start with the endocannabinoid system and explaining them. Do you know you have one? We all have one. And what is it for? That's a good start."
She points at the International Cannabinoid Research Society, which has held an annual congress for thirty-five years. "And we cannot ignore that."
She is a mother of three. Two of them are homeschooled.
"So I do a lot at home as a mom. When I am at home, I also travel a lot, but when I am at home, I do all the things. Cooking, taking care of the kids."
This is the reason her work runs late, and she says so without apology.
"Sometimes I interview people that after I don't have the time to process all the conversation, we add into a text and to put it on the website. So I do my best, but just recently I published an interview I did last year, almost one year ago here at Mary Jane."
She has a name for it.
"Something called slow journalism takes time. But when it comes out, you will know it's a good one."
She is not competing for the crowd around her. She says the sixty thousand people at the trade fair are probably not her readers.
"But I'm sure that there are professionals and specialists in areas that they like to have more profound, more in-depth information and knowledge. So it's for them that we work."
She wants the site to last longer than the news cycle it sits in.
"So this can be an archive available."
She is clear-eyed about how people read now, including that most of them do not.
"I know people nowadays they don't read. They read titles and they consider themselves informed. And this is not very good, because information goes a long way. So all the titles you see everywhere — TV, social media — they mean nothing if you don't really verify that information."
Asked what keeps her at it, she does not talk about journalism at all.
"I really believe I am connected with the network of people with the same mission."
Then she goes somewhere larger, and she knows she is doing it.
"We need to regenerate the soils. We need to give the plant back to the people, back to the farmers."
And at the end, unprompted, the thing underneath all of it.
"We can be just enjoying being here, because we won't be here for too long. And I think people sometimes think they are invincible and they can achieve anything in the world. But they just forget about themselves."
Video portrait coming soon / EN edition