It’s the school of marijuana
LONDON: Jean Kennedy has degrees in biology and a Master’s in special education. Now, she’s trying to decide what to do with her third degree: a certificate of achievement from Oaksterdam University, the Harvard Business School of Marijuana.
“I’m Italian,” said Kennedy, 56, a retired high school biology teacher with greying hair. “You know Italians, we grow tomatoes. Maybe I’ll grow some plants.”
Horticulture 102 is one of the many subjects she studies at Oaksterdam, whose campus is set amid the hip cafés, restaurants and cannabis dispensaries of downtown Oakland. Founded in 2007, the school sees itself as a training ground for citizen advocates in the fight to legalise marijuana.
Oaksterdam is rebounding after a 2012 raid by the government which deems marijuana a Schedule One illegal drug – the same category as cocaine and heroin. Federal agents, many of them masked and armed, broke down the doors with battering rams, carting away an estimated 60 000 cannabis plants and scattering the school’s terrified faculty and students.
The university was devastated by the raid, which Oaksterdam founder Richard Lee dismissed as a “last-ditch effort” to enforce marijuana laws that were out of step with the times.
Medical marijuana was approved by Californian voters in 1996. In the years since the raid, four states and the District of Columbia have legalised pot, making it a legitimate business in parts of the US, worth an estimated $3.5bn (R497 billion) a year.
Robert Raich, a lawyer who has twice argued legalisation cases before the US Supreme Court, takes “Cannabusiness 102”, where he warns students of the risk inherent in cultivating the drug.
“Until the federal government changes the Controlled Substances Act,” Raich said, “I teach how to create defences.” – The Independent