Medical Cannabis and Education
If you want to learn about fixing motors, you can take a course at the local technical college, or get your friend who owns a garage to teach you. If you want to become a ‘mixologist’ (bartender), you can take a class in a variety of places. You’ll be able to walk or drive to these places, and the quality of your instruction will be obvious from the result of your work.
Where do you go when you need training in the field of Medical Cannabis? Well, it’s a safe bet it won’t be the local community college, and if your friend can give you instruction, it very likely won’t be for medical cannabis. Unless you live in a major metropolitan area, it’s unlikely you’ll find a training institute near your home or business, one that addresses all aspects of the medical cannabis industry. You’ll have to look online.
I can’t stress enough the importance of education in this industry. We must take into account the state and local laws and regulations concerning cannabis cultivation and dispensary—few industries are as closely scrutinized as the Medical Cannabis Industry. Consider also developments in cannabis research, leading to new products and new information about effectiveness and ease of their uses. At the end of May, CTI published a blog about seven new cannabinoids that are being researched by the University of Mississippi. It’s too early to say what the benefits of this particular research will be, but it’s going to mean further education for clinicians, cultivators, and dispensaries.
Education is critical for policymakers as well. According to a blog recently posted by the Americans for Safe Access website, only 23 states have passed legislation permitting medical cannabis; another 17 states have passed restrictive cannabis legislation, while the remaining ten have made no adjustments to their current laws. That’s 27 states in need of education and training. CTI offers ten online classes on cannabis law & politics, cannabis as medicine, and cannabis business operations. The policymakers of those 27 states certainly won’t make sound and informed decisions without education!
Physicians who will be prescribing medical cannabis for their qualified patients need training too, something they’ll have to obtain through an online training institute like CTI. Medical school will not have briefed them on the benefits of cannabis sativa over cannabis indica, nor will they be reliably informed about those seven new cannabinoids.
While preparing this blog, I took a quick look at Internet, the starting point for much education these days. ‘Medical Cannabis Education’ in the search engine produced more than 94,000 websites! Based on the content of the sites I looked at, I couldn’t say which was preferable—A or B. I couldn’t tell which offered better, more thorough online cannabis training education. I was turned off by websites that talked about themselves more than they did about the work they do; I wasn’t attracted by sites which would have been better suited to the used-car industry. ‘We are the largest, oldest, biggest, and best’—there’s no good way to verify those claims. What I did find persuasive was the list of affiliations.
CTI’s affiliations with Americans for Safe Access (ASA) and Cannabis and Social Policy (CASP), to name two, speak for our proficiency as an education and training institute. We provide online training about medical cannabis for clinicians, patients, cultivators, dispensaries, and policymakers.