CHARLES R Nesson, the William F Weld Professor at Harvard Law School and founder of the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society and a medical marijuana advocate, will be among several speakers at the historic launch of the Ganja Future Growers and Producers Association at the Jamaica Conference Centre in downtown Kingston on Saturday.

They keynote speaker will be Josh Stanley, director of Strains of Hope.

Professor Nesson, who is a strong believer in Jamaica, is among only a handful of people in history to have graduated summa cum laude from the Harvard Law School, and is said to have achieved the highest grade point average since Felix Frankfurter graduated in 1907.

He is credited for charting the early field of Internet law in 1997 when he helped found the Berkman Centre. Nesson has taught evidence, criminal law, trial law, torts, and ethics for Harvard Law School and continues to incorporate cutting-edge technology into his classes.

Before joining the law school faculty in 1966, Nesson clerked for Justice John Marshall Harlan of the US Supreme Court and worked as a special assistant to John Doar in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

Stanley, co-founder of Strains of Hope, recently started the non-profit organisation that is dedicated to trying to get governments around the world to legalise the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

He is one of six brothers who have cultivated a special strain of marijuana in Colorado in the United States that is used to treat children with seizure disorder (epilepsy) and autism.

The Stanley brothers breed the marijuana so that it is low in THC, the psychoactive component of ganja that gets people high, but full of cannabidiol, or CBD, a component believed to be a key to the medicinal properties of marijuana.

The brothers named their low-THC, high-CBD strain “Charlotte’s Web”, a tribute to the success of their first paediatric patient.