Posted on 11/28/2009 11:09:33 AM PST by Sub-Driver
At This School, It’s Marijuana in Every Class By TAMAR LEWIN
SOUTHFIELD, Mich. — At most colleges, marijuana is very much an extracurricular matter. But at Med Grow Cannabis College, marijuana is the curriculum: the history, the horticulture and the legal how-to’s of Michigan’s new medical marijuana program.
“This state needs jobs, and we think medical marijuana can stimulate the state economy with hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars,” said Nick Tennant, the 24-year-old founder of the college, which is actually a burgeoning business (no baccalaureates here) operating from a few bare-bones rooms in a Detroit suburb.
The six-week, $485 primer on medical marijuana is a cross between an agricultural extension class covering the growing cycle, nutrients and light requirements (“It’s harvest time when half the trichomes have turned amber and half are white”) and a gathering of serious potheads, sharing stories of their best highs (“Smoke that and you are ... medicated!”).
The only required reading: “Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower’s Bible” by Jorge Cervantes.
Even though the business of growing medical marijuana is legal under Michigan’s new law, there is enough nervousness about the enterprise that most students at a recent class did not want their names or photographs used. An instructor also asked not to be identified.
“My wife works for the government,” one student said, “and I told my mother-in-law I was going to a small-business class.”
While California’s medical marijuana program, the country’s oldest, is now big business, with hundreds of dispensaries in Los Angeles alone, the Michigan program, which started in April, is more representative of what is happening in other states that have legalized medical marijuana.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
At least everyone will get a high grade...
Match book covers to be en vogue once again.
No different than a class to teach you how to brew beer.
From the headline, I thought the story was about UC-Santa Cruz.
It is not grown or processed by legitimate pharmaceutical companies. It is not subject to FDA legislation. Despite requiring a prescription, it is not required to be sold only through pharmacies. In fact, in some states, it is required to be sold through "Marijuana Dispensaries", which are basically hippie owned and operated head shops.
It is basically a legalization of domestic production and sale of recreational marijuana. Some new age spiritual advisor can prescribe healing crystals and Acapulco Gold and you can go down to hippy Harry's medicinal marijuana dispensary and bong shop and get your dime bag.
The guy who runs the pizza-joint outside that campus must be a multi-millionaire.
The Taco Bell around the block must be doing a great business!!!
Except that beer won’t land about 10 ATF/FBI agents in your living room at 4am.
LOL
The real money is in hemp, not marijuana. After a brief “high”, the long term value of marijuana as a medicinal crop, or even a recreational drug, is probably under $10B nationwide. Hemp, on the other hand, is such a useful product, that its industry could generate along the lines of five times that much value.
Paper, plastic, textiles and fabrics, animal fodder, and food products, all derived from hemp, which can be grown in marginal farmland, with little irrigation, fertilizer, pesticide, in most of the continental US.
On top of its direct value, it has a superb hidden value of replacing raw materials we currently use for this stuff, so that they can be used for higher value purposes.
For example, right now, instead of using trees for high grade lumber, we pulp the trees for low quality pulp paper. By using hemp for paper, we first get much better quality paper, and the high price of lumber drops, because we have more lumber. In the long term, it even becomes more profitable to grow hard wood trees instead of pine, because it is better quality wood, and hard wood makes much better furniture than pine or oak.
And fine processed hemp cloth is much like silk in its look and feel. So our clothing is better quality as well. It also blends well with cotton.
You seem to know a lot about this stuff.
You seem to know a lot about this stuff....Dave, is that you?
True. That’s why we should end the failed drug war.
I once saw an interesting economic analysis of the theoretical hemp industry as part of America’s huge, immense agribusiness system. The economist who presented it pointed out that the US could have a $50B+ a year industry, and a great number of jobs, but we don’t, and for pretty dumb reasons.
The greatest irony is that commercial quantities of hemp would actually harm the quality of marijuana, because its pollen would fertilize the female marijuana plants from which the resin is produced, lowering the resin production and reducing the potency of the drug.
So instead of making a huge fortune, we are spending a huge fortune for nothing. Which is just bad economics.
So is the opium poppy and the coca plant.
My point is "Medical Marijuana" is a farce. It is defacto legalization with a fig leaf of "medicine", however it is sold as no other prescription medicine is sold. That fig leaf is for the weak politicians who do not have the guts to do the libertarian thing and just decriminalize it.
Do I want the government in everything? No, however I think consistency is helpful. I can think of no other controlled substance which requires a prescription which does not require some governmental oversight.
Why should someone not be able to go to "Holistic Healer" and get a prescription for Heroine, to be filled at a "Heroine Dispensary" (aka Opium Den)?
How about someone with a toothache be able to go to a psychologist and get a prescription for Cocaine, to be filled at the local street corner "Imported Dental Anesthetics Dispensary"?
If you would like to be added or dropped from the Michigan ping list, please freepmail me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.