SCHOOL OF POT

If Oakland's newest college had a football team, the players would
probably be more interested in snacks than sacks.

Imagine a school where the student teacher ratio is 15 to 1, and
discussions range from politics and the law to how to bake brownies.
Has Alice Waters gone academic? Nope. It's Oakland's Oaksterdam
University, aka Cannabis College, and it opened in an empty storefront
on 15th Street just last month.

The name is a play on similar institutions in freewheeling Amsterdam,
and course offerings include Distribution, Weighing, and Packaging;
Cooking and Concentrates (the aforementioned brownie class); Retail
Management; and Budtending - which really needs no explanation, unless
you're over the age of 80. And according to the school's ad in the SF
Weekly, the money graduates jonesing for a career in weed can look
forward to is surprisingly good - from $50K to $100K annually.

But why, you may wonder, do we need formal instruction in how to grow
and sell pot? It seems like amateurs have done pretty well on their
own. The idea is to create a bigger and better pool of potential
employees, says Oaksterdam president Richard Lee. Right now the
industry is still small, and pot club managers have to spend a huge
amount of time on staff training. "If a client wants something to
ease chemotherapy symptoms, not all of my employees have the
experience to know which strain to use," says a manager at the Greed
Door medicinal pot club in San Francisco.

Does Lee expect any heat form the authorities? "So far, our lawyers
have said it doesn't seem to be anything too outrageous," he says.
That could be because enforcement of marijuana laws is the lowest
police priority in cities such as Oakland and San Francisco. But
marijuana is illegal under federal law (Ed Rosenthal, anyone?), so
prospective students should at least be aware of the risk.

Of course, that risk may depend on how the school defines "class
participation." Will the students smoke the crop they learn to
cultivate, for example? "No," says Lee. "That won't be part of the
class. But if they do it on their break times...."