At the intersection of academia, industry, and the old underground culture of cannabis are people like Samuel Haiden, a botany graduate student at the University of Connecticut who spent 10 years as a cannabis grower in Maine.
“I tried to start a large farm, and it just blew up completely,” he said, explaining that scaling up to hundreds of plants was beyond him as a long-time grower. “I ended up deciding, ‘OK, you need to learn more about science if you’re going to keep growing at scale, if you want to make this a long-term thing.'”
Haiden was something of a rock star at the university’s first Cannabis Research Symposium. At age 32, he has far more experience in cannabis growing than most of the other researchers, botanists, horticulturists geneticists, psychiatrists, pain researchers, health care workers, and policy wonks drawn to the symposium.
It was a rare look at a young industry in the throes of change. Unlike other cannabis industry conventions full of hustle, networking, and sales pitches, the UConn symposium focused on science, policy and maximizing the value of cannabis.
“Most cannabis conferences are just selling products, really nothing substantive,” said Gerald Berkowitz, a professor of horticulture and cannabis researcher at UConn. “So, I’m really happy we’re doing this.”
Cannabis has been decriminalized and legal for medical use for about a decade in Connecticut. Recreational use has been legal since 2021, and recreational sales began this year. For the decades before that, cannabis cultivation and use were underground, research was heavily restricted and nobody openly talked about cannabis horticulture.
“In 2016, I couldn’t even get seeds mailed to me,” Berkowitz said. “It was illegal to mail it across state lines. I had to meet with the state attorney general, and UConn itself was worried about connections to cannabis.”
Berkowitz helped organize the symposium after years of struggling to get his students access to a medical marijuana growing facility for an educational trip. While student and researcher interest was high, he recalled there was a lot of concern about the trip from the university and state back in 2014.
“The Department of Consumer Protection rejected the field trip permit four times,” Berkowitz said. “We had to submit the names and social security numbers of every student in the class.”
After months of back-and-forth, Berkowitz brought his students to a Curaleaf facility, where they learned that no one with formal horticulture experience was working in the greenhouses.
“They said, ‘We’ve got no horticulture’,” Berkowitz recalled. “We just hire people who grew pot in their basement.”
Now, people employed at cannabis companies are attending summer horticulture classes offered by UConn, and undergraduates across the state are getting into botany because of the draw of the legal cannabis industry.
“I’ve noticed a lot of people who don’t have scientific training have grown these plants successfully,” said Bryan Connolly, a botany professor at Eastern Connecticut State University. “For learning about botany and plant physiology, it’s really a gateway plant.”
Connolly is building a cannabis program at ECSU within the science department. He said he was hired specifically with the program in mind.
“They were looking for a botanist to teach traditional botany within a traditional biology program, but they also wanted to start a cannabis program,” Connolly said.
He said the administration saw the writing on the wall with legalization and thought it would make an excellent STEM job training program. “I think it was very far-sighted to see that this program would be of interest to people.”
The cannabis program is offered as a minor at ECSU with the hope of expanding into a major in the next few years. Much of the back-end work of getting the program off the ground occurred during the pandemic.
Connolly said students from programs across the university had expressed interest in his cannabis classes. Many non-science students, or students who had no interest in botany before, were coming through his door.
“I have a student who came to me from physical education, very sharp, very motivated, hopes to enter the industry,” Connolly said. Without a cannabis course, “he never would have trained in botany at all.”
Some people, like Haiden, are traveling in the other direction, from the cannabis industry into research.
Haiden considers himself a legacy operator. Unlike many people trying to research the plant, Haiden had tons of practical experience. Around the time his farm in Maine failed, Haiden heard Berkowitz was interested in studying cannabis. So, he reached out and was instantly offered a position as a graduate student.
Haiden recalls a simple conversation. “Gerry asked me two questions: ‘You have your bachelor’s already?’ I said yes. And he said, ‘And you know how to grow weed?’ I said yeah, why? He said, ‘Well, why don’t you come down and be my full-time research assistant?'”
Haiden never expected to thrive at UConn. He had never been much of an academic, his bachelors was in English and he’d had a career as a chef. He’d been kicked off the soccer team in high school for possession.
“He tossed me in the deep end, and I ended up swimming pretty well,” Haiden said. “Turns out this is a solid place for me to be.”
Haiden presented his research on the genetics of trichome growth (the part of the cannabis plant that secretes THC), to a full, attentive crowd. Later he closed out the symposium moderating a panel of local industry luminaries.
Even so, Haiden said he felt torn between the intersection of academia, industry and the old underground culture.
“I argue with people in the institution of academia about the culture. I argue with the culture about the science,” Haiden said. “I’m fighting everybody all the time.”
In his experience, independent cannabis growers didn’t have much respect for scientific rigor, and scientists didn’t have much regard for the spirit that kept cannabis alive during criminalization. The growth and increasing professionalization of the industry threatened that independent spirit.
“People risked their lives,” Haiden said. “I think about how many white-knuckle drives I had going from Maine to Massachusetts, knowing that if I got pulled over, my life could be over.”
He hoped that studying cannabis and the effects of THC on things like pain, PTSD and other applications would shift the balance back to appreciating the psychedelic and spiritual aspects of cannabis within more mainstream culture. He also hoped to bring scientific rigor to independent growers to compete with big growers.
“I think we’re definitely in a transitional phase,” Haiden said. “Cannabis isn’t a gateway drug for people, but I hope it’s a gateway drug for institutions. I hope it changes the institutions more than the institutions change cannabis.”
The future of cannabis is far from certain. The plant, drug and industry exist in a legal grey area, making medical claims hard to study, limiting scientific study and making business challenging.
Many makers of medical cannabis products are also new to making stable, consistent products or are switching to recreational use. A pharmacist for The Botanist dispensary in Danbury at the symposium shared an anecdote about one of their suppliers failing to have a backup pill press machine.
Local business people on the industry panel at the symposium expressed frustration at the stigma, uncertain regulatory environment and “wild west” of product testing and availability. How things are going to settle isn’t clear. Haiden said the differences between recreational and medical will grow sharper in the short term.
“I think in the immediate future, one of the things that will happen is the bifurcation of medical and recreational,” he said. “You won’t have people going into a dispensary to treat their specific type of migraine alongside someone who is looking to get high. Those people should be going to different places.”
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