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Â鶹¹ÙÍø & Wales’ new Cannabis Entrepreneurship program prepares students to succeed in one of the world’s fastest-growing industries.

In 2000, Colorado became one of the first states to legalize medical marijuana. Almost overnight, demand spawned an ecosystem of growers, sellers and buyers who had to figure out the basic market principles of a commodity that was still considered illegal by the federal government, which classifies cannabis as a schedule one narcotic. Nearly a decade later, as Timothy McDowell ’08 entered the industry, Colorado’s cannabis pioneers were still clueless.

After graduating from Â鶹¹ÙÍø & Wales University Providence Campus in 2008 with a business administration degree (he’d earned an associate’s degree in culinary arts in 1999), McDowell moved to Boulder, Colorado. There, after a short stint with Whole Foods, he began working with the owner of a grow farm and dispensary who wanted to take advantage of McDowell’s food preparation experience to expand into edibles, a segment of the market that hadn’t been tapped, and promised an explosive yield. Plus, the cannabis industry was bound to be more exciting that sitting behind a desk at Whole Foods. “Corporate life was unfulfilling,” McDowell says. “I missed the action of working in kitchens for 16 years.”

McDowell and his partner rented a small kitchen across the back alley from a brewery and began watching instructional YouTube videos. They taught themselves how to extract tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) from plants using ethanol. They were evasive with suppliers wary of associating with a medicinal marijuana company, despite its legality. They tested the concentration of their offerings not in a lab, but by serving batches to their neighbors, the brewers. “Making drinks, labeling drinks, taking orders on the phone, putting them in my Kia, driving to Denver, selling them for cash, going to the grocery store, buying groceries, taking the rest and putting it into the business. That’s how it started,” McDowell says. “Nobody knew what was going on.”

Today, McDowell’s company — MarQaha (an Arabic word for bliss), which still manufactures gummies and other edibles, including drinks and tinctures barely resembles the makeshift business he patched together during the heady days of medical-use legalization. At company headquarters, now in Denver, 27 cameras survey the building because the state requires every inch of the facility to be monitored at all times. While outsiders might expect to find lava lamps lighting the halls and beanbag chairs piled in the corner, the 5,000-square-foot production space resembles a laboratory. Glass tubes and complicated-looking machinery sit on stainless steel tables; dozens of boxes filled with vials of tinctures stand ready to be shipped. Where in early days McDowell used a simple box fan to vent ethanol fumes, MarQaha today must install the materials necessary to render a room explosion-proof. The workers in the production space don hairnets, and a $25,000 homogenizer mixes tinctures and drinks at vigorous speeds to ensure the concentration of THC is consistent throughout products. No ingredient is used without being marked, dated and recorded. “Ninety percent of making edibles isn’t cannabis,” McDowell says. “It’s food safety.”

Colorado’s 2014 legalization of recreational marijuana accelerated regulation, and therefore professionalism, of the industry, McDowell says. To further illustrate that point, McDowell pulls up a program called Metrc on his computer screen. Colorado requires all licensed marijuana vendors to use the interface to track every seed of cannabis from farm to dispensary. (Each plant is tagged with a radio-frequency identification technology microchip.) If a sample tests positive for, say, high amounts of heavy metals, the entire batch of edibles it came from must be tossed.

In short: The marijuana industry doesn’t have much space for the Jeff Spicoli stereotype anymore — not on the business side of the counter, anyway. “[We’ve had to] take the magic of cannabis out of it,” McDowell says. “The industry needs trained employees.”

Soon, McDowell will be able to turn to his alma mater to find them.

 

While a global pandemic devastated much of the economy in 2020, cannabis thrived.

Annual legal sales in the United States skyrocketed by 46 percent last year to $12.1 billion, according to the market research firm BDSA, and that increase isn’t a COVID-19-induced blip: Global sales are expected to more than double, to $55.9 billion, by 2026, and much of that revenue is bound to be made in the United States, where 36 states have already approved medical marijuana and 18 states have legalized it for recreational use; a few more are currently considering legislation that establishes some form of legalized adult use. 

Having owned and operated a number of hospitality companies, Magnus Thorsson, Ph.D., ’94, an assistant professor in Â鶹¹ÙÍø’s College of Business, recognizes an entrepreneurial opportunity when he spots it. In 2018, Thorsson and Michael J. Budziszek, Ph.D., an associate professor of science in the John Hazen White College of Arts & Sciences, began writing curriculum for a degree tract that would examine both the business and science of cannabis.

Â鶹¹ÙÍø’s Bachelor of Science degree in Cannabis Entrepreneurship finally launches in fall 2021 on the Providence Campus, becoming the first degree program in the Northeast to provide students with a deep understanding of how to cultivate a business as well as the plant that will spur that business’ growth. “There’s nothing that has the potential that cannabis offers right now,” Thorsson says. “It was a sure thing to do.”

In many respects, principles taught in the Cannabis Entrepreneurship program will be useful to any businessperson looking to start and run their own company. Thorsson says students will enter the program with their own ideas — whether it’s to infuse chocolate with THC or develop health products using CBD, a non-psychoactive cannabis compound whose purported relaxation benefits have sparked a nearly $2 billion market in the United States. Professors will teach students how to spot a need, how to calculate the costs associated with filling that need and whether or not their company can operate within the margins. Administrators in Â鶹¹ÙÍø’s College of Food Innovation & Technology — an interdisciplinary college that launched in January and explores the economic, social and political effects culinary systems have on people — are looking to develop business classes that dovetail with the cannabis entrepreneurship program, Thorsson says.

Because the federal government continues to classify cannabis as a schedule one narcotic, institutions that receive federal support are not permitted to grow the plant, even for research purposes. Nevertheless, Â鶹¹ÙÍø is remodeling space inside its John J. Bowen Center for Science and Innovation to accommodate two grow labs. The school has applied for a license to grow hemp, which is classified as a cannabis plant but contains only 0.3 percent THC. In the meantime, students will cultivate tomatoes and other plants that mimic the growth pattern of cannabis. “We’ll teach how to grow the plant, a little bit of extraction, pest management, genetics and chemistry,” Budziszek says. “So students get a really well-rounded scientific view of the plant.”

And while the program is billed for entrepreneurs interested in starting their own businesses, the industry can’t wait to welcome trained talent to their workforce. “I have a lot of respect for Â鶹¹ÙÍø & Wales getting in front of this thing,” says Derek Ross, CEO of Nova Farms, one of the largest cannabis producers in Massachusetts. “They’re blazing the path.”