Northern Michigan University is offering a four-year bachelor of science degree in Marijuana Studies, and I plan on demanding course credit for all the independent study I did in that field while I was in college. According to The Detroit Free Press, the course is actually kind of a buzzkill, and Snoop Dog won’t be a guest lecturer.
“When they hear what my major is, there are a lot of people who say, ‘Wow, cool dude. You’re going to get a degree growing marijuana,’” said [Alex Roth] the 19-year-old sophomore at Northern Michigan in Marquette. “But it’s not an easy degree at all.”
It doesn’t actually sound like an easy degree, especially considering half of the people in the classes are going to be entirely baked.
But the NMU program is unique, mixing chemistry, biology, botany, horticulture, marketing and finance in a four-year program that began this semester. The first class has a dozen students, but Dr. Mark Paulsen, director of the university’s chemistry department, expects that number to grow quickly.
That’s a lot of hoops to jump through to become a certified potologist or whatever they’re going to call people who take the course. I hope they offer a course on how to deal with your friends going “Wait, so you can get me high like, scientifically?”
Another board member, Steve Mitchell of West Bloomfield, said there wasn’t any hesitancy from the board in approving the degree program, especially after they found out that the students won’t actually be growing marijuana plants.
“No one is growing marijuana. No one is violating and state or federal laws,” he said. “But there are a lot of plants that can be studied.”
I hate to break it to you, Steve Mitchell, but every single student in that course is going to be growing marijuana, they’re just not doing it at the school. Now I was an English major, so I was more on the demand-side of marijuana studies in college, but every single one of the people I bought my weed from were taking at least a minor in horticulture.
Also, does anyone else find it odd that with marijuana legalization you now need a four-year degree to do something my idiot friends used to do in their closet with a grow light? Lawmakers are completely terrified of a plant that’s safer than the lighter you use to smoke it and have placed all sorts of regulations on it, despite the fact that about the worst thing that can happen if you smoke too much pot is you take a long nap in the middle of the day.