Al Olson is a journalist with nearly 40 years of experience in mainstream print and online media. He has spent the past six years reporting and studying the cannabis industry. Olson began his journalism career working at a handful of daily newspapers in California, including the San Jose Mercury News, where he was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989. In 1995, he left the world of print journalism to help the launch of MSNBC.com as one of its founding editors. He spent most of the past 19 years pioneering online journalism at NBC.com, CNBC.com and TODAY.com. In 2014, he was named the first Cannabis Editor for CNBC. "As a young journalist, two of my heroes were Walter Cronkite and Hunter S. Thompson. I admired Cronkite's integrity and Thompson's dramatic flair,” said Olson. “Although these two journalists were on opposite ends of the news spectrum, both understood that the War on Drugs was a colossal failure."