Most people in the industry will tell you that they have a personal cannabis story that led them to their current role. One such industry leader, Katie Stem, CEO of Peak Extracts in Oregon is no exception.
Stem was diagnosed at the young age of 21 with Crohn’s disease and like other sufferers, she wanted freedom from the symptoms and day-to-day struggles. Moving from Minnesota to Oregon in 2004, she took a job at the Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU), which is a research hospital.
After completing the move, her visit to a gastroenterologist to discuss Crohn’s led to his recommendation to try cannabis as a treatment for the symptoms. At the time, Oregon’s MMJ program was new and fortunately, Crohn’s was on the list of qualifying conditions, so Stem was able to obtain a patient card. She would go on to experiment with different strains and through the process learned that different strains had a huge impact on different symptoms. With her self-education came the notion that she wanted to find consumption methods aside from smoking, which is when she began making her own strain-specific edibles.
“I worked at OHSU for several years doing research on MS. My work there was mostly focused on natural products and pharmacology. We were comparing normal pharmaceutical drugs and interventions compared to green tea, fish oil, or grape seed extract, and what the effect on all of those things were on inflammation and the progression of MS,” said Stem in a subsequent interview. After ending her tenure with OHSU, she went to school for Chinese herbal medicine and became certified and the master of her own practice in 2010, all the while, continuing to make infused chocolates.
Today, Stem is the CEO of Peak Extracts, which focuses on full-spectrum formulations rather than isolates. Her work at OHSU with EGCG, a long acronym that she says is the active component in green tea, led her to the business model for Peak. “Ultimately, it’s better for the patients, it’s a more nuanced effect and it’s different from strain to strain, because there’s a huge variety of pharmacologically active substances. A lot of the terpenes can affect the way that reuptake or absorption occurs. It’s a super varied myriad of compounds, based on how you extract it and how you preserve all the characteristics.”
Today, Katie Stem has found fulfillment in her career, which Crohn’s and cannabis brought her to. “That’s why it’s so important that people can choose, because what makes someone sleepy might make someone else really hyper. There’s something special about the chemistry of each of these strains, so I really want people to be able to choose what they are going to go through.”
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