Newsletter
Business Medical Cannabis

Cannabis College: Could It Be The New ‘Thing?‘

Written by Marguerite Arnold

Going to college to study cannabis? Don’t laugh. It is becoming trend…

THC-focused trade schools have started to spring up over the last decade particularly in the United States. The most well-known perhaps being Oaksterdam University but there are others. Humboldt Cannabis College, for example, in the heart of California’s so-called “Green Triangle” is another variant on this. If you want to know how to grow cannabis, professionally, in other words, the help is now out there.

Yet beyond a more trade school approach, there are other aspects of this business that are attracting the interest of more academically inclined institutions these days. As a result, other universities are now looking at the green rush as a way to increase their own paying course loads.

Take the Universities of Vermont and Ohio State. Both are offering for-credit courses in cannabis biology and drug law. UC Davis is offering an undergraduate class on the physiology of pot. Ohio State’s law school is offering a law class. And they are not the only ones. They are just the newest. Hofstra began offering a similar class several years ago.

Cannabis is an art and a science

The first thing this trend really means is that cannabis use is becoming accepted in society. As a result, new students must be trained to deal with that reality. After decades of teaching that all drugs were “bad,” academia is now beginning to alter course.

The irony here of course is that there have been many college kids who have gone to university to unofficially “study” weed. In the future, however, especially as it can turn into a lucrative profession, students will just be a bit more up-front about admitting it to their parents.

There are at present, no business school offerings at any major university that focus on this space.

In the meantime, the medical part of the industry will begin to attract biologists and other research scientists who have long been banned from the field because of the scheduling of the drug.

As medical cannabis becomes accepted in fact, as medicine, look in particular for more scientifically focused programs at major universities around the world.

For the meantime? Law and public policy courses are about as exciting as this is going to get. The rest is still all field work.

Have anything to add? Your voice matters! Join the conversation and contribute your insights and ideas below.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

About the author

Marguerite Arnold