Canadian university to offer online course in marijuana management

Trent Crabtree | college.usatoday.com

A Canadian university wants to help students interested in growing and selling medical marijuana enter the expanding industry by offering a new online class this fall.

Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia has designed “Introduction to Professional Management of Marijuana for Medical Purposes in Canada” to prepare students for the “successes and continual challenges” of the medical marijuana industry. The 14-week course will be taught exclusively online and will consist of four modules: plant production and facility management, legalities and regulations, marketing, sales and patient acquisition and medical conditions and drug development.



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Jim Pelton, the executive director of continuing and professional studies at KPU, says he first recognized the need for this type of course during lunch with a horticulture instructor at the school. At that meeting, it was determined that KPU needed to provide the necessary training for students wanting to be a part of an emerging but highly regulated industry in Canada.

“There are some Colorado-like changes taking place to legislation in Canada,” Pelton says. “We did a bit of market research and the research indicated that the industry does believe there is a need for this kind of training. We are the College of Professional Studies here, so it’s really our job to respond to industry training needs.”

Tegan Adams is a business development manager at Experchem Laboratories Inc., a Toronto-based company that helps medical marijuana businesses test cannabis and obtain licenses that allow them to grow and sell medical marijuana. While working as a marijuana consultant for a number of public companies at the end of last year, Adams -- like Pelton -- also noticed a lack of qualified industry professionals while at job fairs held by these companies.

Adams decided that the best way to fill this void in the industry was to develop and teach an introductory-level college course that addressed the management side of the industry -- something that would also utilize her previous experience as a teaching assistant at the University of British Columbia.

“I went around to a few universities and Kwantlen seemed to be the best fit to start an intro course,” Adams says. “I got in touch with [Pelton] and made a proposal to him and he accepted it.”

To create the curriculum, Adams says she sought feedback from about 20 different professionals in the industry.

“We had a round-robin feedback session with them on different topics to include and we worked with the Canadian National Medical Marijuana Association to develop all the content,” Adams says.

According to Adams, the hope for the course is that it will create a new profession in Canada’s marijuana market that doesn’t currently exist. Unlike the U.S. -- where individual states have chosen to decriminalize marijuana’s use in specific cases -- Canada’s marijuana industry is regulated on a federal level by Health Canada, the department that runs the country’s national public healthcare system.



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According to Adams, this national regulation has created a labor gap between two essential sides of the industry. With Health Canada running things from the middle, neither side has someone to cater to their unique needs in the market.

“A lot of people in the industry are either really great growers who have been really passionate about it for a long time or this wave of investors who see it as a cash crop,” Adams says. “This course is intended to help those two groups have a middle management section that can follow the regulations and work with them both.”



Trent Crabtree is a student at The University of Oklahoma and a summer 2015 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.