UConn Students Experiment With Classroom Cannabis
UConn has been growing hemp in a campus greenhouse for several years. Photo by Ryan Caron King for Connecticut Public Radio
It’s something you might expect to see on a poster in a dorm. Bright green leaves, fanned and serrated.
It’s cannabis. Except today, it’s center stage on a table in the biggest lecture hall on UConn’s campus. But first, it had to get there.
“I drive a UConn van into the middle of campus and I unload all the cannabis plants into the largest lecture hall,” said Madison Blake, a junior horticulture major at UConn, who brought these hemp plants from greenhouse to classroom table.
“There’s a lot of ‘oohing and aahing’ generally. Especially when you’re, like, carrying them on carts.”
Hemp and marijuana are both types of cannabis. But chemically, they’re different. Hemp has cannabidiol or CBD, but not enough THC to produce the high induced by marijuana.
Hemp is used in everything from beauty products to clothing. And UConn is teaching a whole class on growing just this one kind of plant.