Mary Jane and the Buffalo: Taking the High out of Higher Education

There’s a long and venerable American tradition linking academia and marijuana. For half a century, college towns have been the sole business communities to form a stable symbiosis with the unique ecology of used record stores, coffee houses, pun-laced pot-themed late night food establishments, organic vegan grocery stores, and head shops that support a thriving marijuana community. Official US government reports track herb smoking from the heady Berkley scene of the late 1960s through 1970s academia where they determine, “It is commonly hypothesized that marijuana use first burgeoned among college students”. T

University of Colorado’s Boulder campus has its own special and storied relationship with the good herb. In 1991, students staged a hemp protest on campus after the local head shop, the Pipefitter, was raided by the US Customs Service. By 1999, the campus had embarked on its course as a Mecca for student stoners nationwide, the annual 4/20 Smoke-Out growing to draw over 10,000 participants to the campus each spring. A decade later, the Boulder campus was a spearhead leading the barely sprouted Colorado industry, with CU NORML hosting a two-day industry forum on campus in April 2009 that would lay the foundation for the first wave of Boulder County dispensaries and ancillary businesses.

Unofficial reports claim that by 2015, CU application rates surged over 35 percent thanks to aspirants looking to delve either professionally or personally into Colorado’s fabled herb stash. The academic departments are even getting in on the fun, offering courses to cater to the changing times. The administration, on the other hand, is as committed to clamping down on the party as the stodgy dean in How High.

Since 2005, the CU administration has deployed countermeasures ranging from a hyperactive sprinkler system to dozens of gallons of ultra-stinky fish fertilizer, and rewards for snitching out on-campus stoners to a small army of private security agents to clamp down on puffing on school grounds. As legal standards softened statewide, the state school found itself dancing awkwardly between facilitating off campus housing for medical marijuana patients in 2008 to an outright ban on all forms of smoke on the grounds just five years later.

The complicated and ambivalent relationship between Mary Jane and the Buffalo is drawn tauter than ever by the growing demand for new cannabis-centric academic programs.

The course catalog for CU Boulder Law School is for the first time this fall offering LAWS 7718—The Regulation of Marijuana—which “is based on state and federal law regulating marijuana in Colorado. Topics include medical and recreational legalization, state and local regulation and taxation of marijuana commerce, and practical issues for marijuana businesses.” The paradox between Colorado law and Federal law is increasingly relevant statewide, and especially on campus, where researchers are working to conduct the first legitimate scientific studies on cannabis since the lifting of the shroud of prohibition.

“It’s impossible to get Federal grants to study the products available in Colorado. Research can be very expensive, and it becomes exceedingly difficult when those federal institutions turn away,” explains CU Neuroscience graduate and researcher Andrea Sobel. In general, Sobel explains, “There are a lot of concerns regarding cannabis research and our affiliation with the University of Colorado. At the time of the approval of our [research] protocols, cannabis remains classified as a Schedule I controlled substance by the DEA.” The illegality at the Federal level means Sobel and her team can’t conduct any controlled laboratory research on the products available all over town.

Even the mighty Colorado buffalo, a majestic symbol of frontier freedom, is cowed by the screeching bald eagle of the US Government.

“The University has considerable Federal funding,” explains Sobel, “and they abide by all of the Federal laws and regulations.” When the Feds’ policy disagrees with the taxpayers who fund the University, the Feds win. Sobel and her team would face “major infractions for having illegal substances on the property”—meaning they couldn’t actually have legal cannabis in their research facility. “The biggest hesitation from the University was making sure that absolutely no cannabis or paraphernalia were in our lab, on the property, or anywhere near the property. This makes it harder for us, as researchers, to eliminate variables like potency, strain type, and quantity.”

This highlights the strange paradox of the research Sobel and her team are conducting. The project was inspired “mainly from the lack of solid, reliable data available,” which she acknowledges, “makes it very difficult for public officials to develop new policies regarding cannabis.” The school can’t stand behind cannabis research on site because they don’t have enough research to support that position—but the research they’d look to support the position is hampered by the lack of support. A classic Catch (four) Twenty-two.
The research team had to approach this issue in the grand tradition of all collegiates chafing under the yoke of a prohibitionist administration: by thinking outside the box. While the standard dorm room practices of wedging a bath towel under the door and exhaling through a paper towel tube stuffed with dryer sheets were out of the question, the team had to figure out how to get subjects high, and get them into the lab for analysis.

The University had made it clear they couldn’t have research subjects blazing in the lab, but it’s not illegal to be under the influence on campus, just to get under it while you’re there. So the research team devised a workaround. “We had our participants use cannabis in the privacy of their own home before coming into the lab for tests.” Once the research subjects get themselves irie in privacy, the lab sends a driver to pick them up to prevent any chance of them driving under the influence.

Despite the blatant buzzkills, Sobel and her team are a big part of the University of Colorado’s continued—often unwitting—leadership in cannabis policy reform. “It makes complete sense that the Universities in Colorado should be jumping all over this unchartered territory. I am beyond ecstatic to tell people that I am part of the beginnings of cannabis research in this state.”

And while it would seem the administration isn’t quite getting funky on the pot brownies like How High’s Dean Cain, the future of serious cannabis research at Colorado schools is looking brighter. “I absolutely know that more cannabis research will come out of the University,” Sobel is excited to tell me. “Earlier this year, researchers at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus were awarded close to 5 million dollars for cannabis-related research, including epilepsy in children.”

The on-again off-again affair between Mary Jane and the buffalo has run cold at the 4/20 Campus Smoke Up, where revelers and protestors abandoned their traditional plans this year, foregoing the gathering entirely. With the quad absent of its usual bongs and bongos, the law school discussing the nitty gritty of hundreds of pages of marijuana law, and the research facilities shuttling stoned subjects, a new relationship between college and cannabis is blossoming on campus: after decades protesting prohibition, it appears that a couple hours past dawn of the new day of legalization, pot is becoming passé at CU.