Dieppe — Marijuana-growing classes are set to start next month in Dieppe, and 25 promising New Brunswick students will have the chance to become professional “medical cannabis cultivation technicians.”
The following year, the same 25 students will learn the same shit all over again.
“That’s the beauty of it: stoners forget everything immediately,” said Marc Doiron, executive director of continuing education for the community college. “It’ll be the ‘Groundhog Day’ of courses. There will be no recruitment costs for the school, the curriculum will never need to be updated, but we can charge tuition to the exact same people each time the class is offered.”
Roger Melanson, provincial minister of post-secondary education, said the program will be the first of its kind in Canada, although the information will be nothing new to the students.
“These kids all already know how to cultivate cannabis — they’re mostly small-time growers and dealers who sell to high schoolers in the parking lot outside Sobeys,” Melanson explained. “We’re not teaching them anything new, we’re just legitimizing what they’re already doing — and profiting from it.”
The province has already hand-picked the pupils who will populate the class from Nov. 2017 until at least 2030 or thereabouts.
“Every time the cops bust a grow-op, they’ve been secretly identifying the best ‘horticulturists’ and marking down their names for when this course became a reality,” Melanson continued. “So we mailed them all a letter inviting them to be in on the ground floor of this new, innovative program. But each year these 25 burnouts will learn the exact same stuff they’ve known since they were 12 years old and growing weed in their parents’ basement.”
We spoke with future student Liam Osborne, 23, of Moncton, who said it’s nice to see his skills being recognized for the first time by someone other than potheads looking to score before 420.
“I got that letter and I was like, dude, ‘sabout time,” croaked Osborne. “I could totally kill at this shit — I grow some dope-ass chronic. They must wanna learn from me.”
Doiron said students like Osborne will enjoy the safety of the classroom while producing weed for local companies such as Organigram — and they’ll be paying to do it.
“They should consider themselves lucky — if they weren’t in class growing marijuana for their province, they’d probably be in jail for growing marijuana in their province.”