CCSF raises bar on higher learning by offering Cannabis Studies degree - San Francisco Chronicle

datangep.blogspot.com

In addition to smoking marijuana, college students can now major in it.

City College of San Francisco announced on Thursday it is planning to offer a degree in cannabis studies, which it says is the first of its kind in the United States.

“The degree is as an introduction to the complex biopsychosocial relationship of humans to cannabis in multiple cultural, institutional and interpersonal contexts,” CCSF officials said in announcing the cannabis studies associate of arts degree, suggesting that marijuana studies can be as much of a grind as any other college major.

Students will be required to take three three-unit cannabis classes — Introduction to Cannabis, Anthropology of Cannabis and Psychology of Psychoactive Drugs — and choose from other classes on such subjects as criminal justice, drug wars, and magic, witchcraft and religion.

“We’re behavioral scientists. We make everything complicated,” said Jennifer Dawgert-Carlin, chair of the behavioral sciences department which is offering the cannabis major.

Students will study marijuana as it relates to crime, race, income, business, revolution, religion and world history. They will do everything that can be done with marijuana except smoke it.

CCSF is a federally funded institution, City College trustee Tom Temprano said, and federal law forbids cannabis students from partaking in cannabis — at least for now.

“Let’s see what happens in a Biden administration,” he said.

CCSF officials hope the new major — four years in the planning — piques student interest and boosts enrollment at the traditionally cash-starved campus. At present, the college is ready to welcome 100 or so cannabis majors.

The official description of the coursework required of all cannabis students suggests that cutting classes to light up is not a good idea.

According to a syllabus for Introduction to Cannabis Studies, students will explore the “social identity, regulation and enforcement (of marijuana) through the lens of social power and inequity.”