Inside a Budding Industry

Education, testing and politics take on marijuana.

By: Matthew Tota, Jeremy Leopold and Shondiin Silversmith

Framed in its simplest form, the question of whether to legalize recreational marijuana in Massachusetts could come down to whether voters feel adults 21 or older should have the right to toke up in their homes. But through our reporting for this project, examining different stances and industries around pot in the state, we have found this question does not do the issue justice.

The debate over marijuana legalization is far more nuanced.

For our project, we reported on a school in Natick that prepares students to work in the marijuana industry and a lab in Milford that tests medical marijuana and dabbles in research on the drug’s medical benefits. We also talked with both sides in the battle over legalization, including the campaign that filed the initiative. We hope the videos and additional reporting included in this blog leave you with a well-rounded understanding of marijuana in Massachusetts ahead of November.

Learning the Principles of Pot

At most schools, teachers don’t share stories in class about pending drug charges or growing marijuana in a neighbor’s yard.

But the Northeastern Institute of Cannabis is not a typical school. And Massachusetts marijuana advocate Bill Downing is not a typical instructor. Downing, who according to the Boston Globe  is facing criminal charges in Boston for allegedly selling an oil product derived from cannabis, teaches several courses at the Natick school, including cultivation and business.

Signs are posted throughout the Northeastern Institute of Cannabis telling students not to bring marijuana into the classroom. -Matthew Tota/Northeastern-

The school, which opened in September 2014, aims to help prospective students start or find jobs in the marijuana industry, ranging from cultivation to testing to patient services. More than 100 students have already graduated from the school’s 12-course program, which costs $2,000 and provides 50 hours of training. To graduate, students must pass a 2-hour exam. And they receive a “certificate of competency,” as no official license exists yet in the state.

“It’s pretty well-accepted by all the employers out there,” said Joe LaChance, the school’s director of admissions. “It shows that you have invested in your career, and it shows that you have a good, general, basic knowledge of cannabis.”

The school has also been active in the push to legalize recreational marijuana in the state. School officials say the buzz over the November ballot measure has led to a recent increase in enrollment.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, the school hosted a “unity cypher” – essentially a large torch made to look like a joint – and planned to parade it around Boston to raise awareness for legalization.

Make Sure the Dosing is Right

The conversation around marijuana often involves legalization, but for the employees of ProVerde Laboratories, it’s all about the science of pot, not the politics.

ProVerde, based in Milford, tests medical marijuana for several of the state’s dispensaries.

Chief Scientific Operator Chris Hudalla said they test to assure that patients receive a safe product.

“We work with a number of the medical marijuana dispensaries here in Massachusetts: They provide their samples to us for testing to meet the regulatory requirements,” he said, adding testing involves measuring the drug for potency and also looking for the presence of any contaminates.

According to Hudalla,  no federal guidelines exist yet for testing.

ProVerde  opened its doors in 2014.

 

Ballot Question

Massachusetts voters will be faced with an important question come election day; a ballot initiative proposed by The Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol would legalize the recreational use of marijuana for adults in Massachusetts who are over 21 years old. There are ardent supporters and opponents of the initiative including The Special Senate Committee on Marijuana, which published a 118-page report listing concerns over the initiative and sharing their findings on their research into marijuana.

The full ballot initiative can be found here: http://www.mass.gov/ago/docs/government/2015-petitions/15-27.pdf
The full senate report can be found here:  http://bit.ly/22RnaX2 (Downloadable PDF) or https://www.scribd.com/doc/303174588/Report-of-the-Special-Senate-Committee-on-Marijuana (web version)

Here is a timeline looking at significant dates in Massachusetts marijuana reform.

Creating Their Own Labels

Athletes, Actors, and Friends Redefine Life with Disabilities

By Aneri Pattani, Jane Casshingham, and Chinyen Chang

Basketball is associated with the athletic. Theater is associated with the dramatic. And friendships are assumed to form between people who are very similar.

But there are plenty of people who break these molds.

They excel at basketball even when people doubt their ability. They pursue the theater arts even when people question that choice. They build friendships that would surprise others.

These are people who do not allow their disabilities to define them. They create their own labels instead. Sometimes actor. Sometimes athlete. Sometimes friend.

The Athletes

Athletes with disabilities often practice just as frequently as college athletes, but they rarely get to show off their skills in the same type of arena. Their fans are often just parents and friends.

Todd Borchers set out to change this by launching the Special Spirit Games six years ago at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. As a Special Olympics coach, Borchers saw how hard his athletes worked, and he wanted to give them the full college experience. He thought having them play on a college basketball court with a college crowd would allow them to feel like basketball superstars.

The game was such a success that it has now spread to two other colleges: University of New Hampshire and Northeastern University in Boston. Borchers hopes it continues to spread to colleges across the country, since “that’s what these athletes deserve,” he says.

The Northeastern University Dance Team cheered on the Special Spirit Game athletes from afar.

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Lynn won, 50-35, against Whitney Academy at Northeastern’s first annual Special Spirit Game.

The Actors

“Acting is something that you associate with Hollywood,” says Matthew Jameson, a college student with disabilities, “but I think we need to realize anyone can do it and everyone should be included.”

Jameson has been a member of an inclusive theater program called Access to Theatre for several years now, and he says ATT helps students overcome the barrier of Hollywood stereotypes.

“There is no weight of expectations,” he says. “You can just be yourself.”

As an inclusive theater skills program, ATT allows youth with and without disabilities to come together and engage in acting exercises. During the school year, the program meets once a week at the Massachusetts Hospital School in Canton. Over the summer, they meet in Boston and write, act, and produce an original play.

The program is unique not only in its emphasis on the creative arts, but also in that it doesn’t aim to help students. Instead, it aims to empower them to advocate for themselves and work to break down the barriers they will face in life.

There are relatively few creative arts programs like ATT in New England. Some of them are shown in the map below:

The Friends

Alex Linden and Julie Belsky enjoy sharing a good pizza. They like checking out the latest movies. And they love water parks.

They have more similarities than differences, they say, often surprising people.

Linden is a 23-year-old physical therapy major at Northeastern University, while Belsky is a 32-year-old Newton resident who works at Target.

The two are best buddies.

They met five years ago through the Northeastern University chapter of Best Buddies – an international organization that aims to end the isolation of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. (Read more about Northeastern Best Buddies here.)

Since then, Linden and Belsky have grown to be close friends. They text and talk, Facetime and call, and go out together regularly.

Belsky’s disabilities don’t factor into their friendship, they say. They’re just like any other friends.

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Photos show Linden and Belsky’s friendship over the years.

Three bites of food

By Jessica Geller, Sara Al Mheiri, and Ashley Young

The first bite at a restaurant is so much more than a mouthful of ingredients. It’s the culmination of starting a food truck, and expanding into five trucks and six restaurants. It’s the reward after angling the food just right to take the Instagram-worthy picture. It’s the combination of eastern and western cuisines to provide a common dish with unique flavors.

We sought out to tell the story of food through different lenses.

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Truck to wheels

Chicken and Rice Guys started as one food truck in 2012. Today, there are five food trucks and two restaurants in the Boston area. The trucks and restaurants serve the same food, but the mindset of running and working the locations is very different. We went inside the truck and the Medford restaurant to gain a firsthand look at the “poultry in motion.”

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Chicken and Rice Guys is not the only business in Boston that started as a food truck and then added restaurant locations. Bon Me, which serves Vietnamese cuisine, has grown from one food truck in 2011, to five trucks and six restaurants today. Danielle Christensen and Anna Hoang spoke to us about working on a food truck.

Mixing flavors

There is no shortage of American, Asian, and Mexican food in Boston. But what about Mexican-Korean or Japanese-American-Italian? Koy and Hojoko are cooking up unique dishes such as carnitas dumplings, kimchi fried rice, and cheeseburgers with dashi pickles (Japanese-flavored pickles). We spoke with the chefs and managers to understand how these flavor combinations come together.

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Memorable restaurants have more than just great food. Hojoko brings a Japanese tradition of hand washing right to its guests. Ashley Cerny, brand ambassador at Hojoko, walks us through the steps of their unique method.

Playing with food – Instagram approved

Picking an item off the menu isn’t so simple when you have thousands of Instagram followers awaiting your next post. Presentation can even be more important than taste. We went behind-the-scenes with @twohungrybostonians (three Wellesley College women actually run the account) to see what it’s really like to run a food account on Instagram.

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Tiffany Lopinsky of @BostonFoodies has more than 60,000 Instagram followers. She reveals the process of perfecting the food picture with cropping, filters, and captions to attract the most likes possible.

A Foreign Struggle

 By Colter Billings, Chao Guo, and Yujing Zhao

Although US academic institutions are welcoming international students, the job market after education is shrinking for them.  Graduation season for international students marks not only the beginning of the next stage of life, but the debilitating start for deciding whether to stay in the U.S. or return home.

They face more challenges than resident students when applying for jobs, either due to the language barrier or culture differences, but they are not fighting alone, and there is always help out there.

Living in the U.S. is never their primary goal, chasing their dream job is.

1.        International Job Hunting

Many  international students want to stay in the U.S. after completing their education, and the job hunting process is never easy. If they want to stay, they have to find a job or an internship that will sponsor them through a lottery. If they cannot find a job or failed in the working visa lottery, then those international students have to go back home.

Wenjia Wang is an MIT graduate and it took her six months to find a job. She describes herself and her work on her personal website (https://wenjia.squarespace.com/).

“Wenjia Wang is an engineer by practice, but an artist/hippie at heart.”

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(Wenjia wang’s paintings posted on her website. Some rights reserved.)

With all her achievements in engineering and art, this talented woman still got rejected by almost all of the corporations she applied to at the beginning of her job hunting process. The language barrier seemed to be the biggest problem that held her back from expressing herself during a job interview.

2.     “Everything Always Works Out OK in the End.”

There are many organizations available to help international students find jobs.

While some international students may need to improve their interview or communication skills, or need a career center to help them develop documents like resumes and cover letters, there are some offices that love to help students.

Ellen Goldman is the Associate Director of Career Development Department at Northeastern which is in charge of holding and planning job searching workshops for international students.

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Christi Barb is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Northeastern University, as well as an Accentologist & Intercultural Communication Coach. She devoted herself to training students in modifying their accents and speech related skills, as well as providing job interview instructions through her workshops in collaboration with the Career Development Department at Northeastern (http://www.northeastern.edu/careers/).

More information about Dr. Barb is available at: http://www.adastraspeech.com/

3.    A blend of China and America: International Students and their Businesses

It’s hard for international students to find a job, let alone start a business. However, many international students are pursuing their entrepreneurial dreams in Boston.

For those young entrepreneurs, living in the U.S. with different cultural backgrounds is something they can take advantage of when starting a business by combining cultural customs to attract new clients.

Wow Barbecue is a restaurant and food truck business that aims to bring a new definition of Chinese style barbecue to Boston. Similarly, the co-founder of Born in Union combines Asian aesthetics with Western street style to produce high-end fashion that is both affordable and attractive for college students and people around the world. Zhisheng Liang, brings to Boston his business of the rarely seen outdoor party activities,  inspired by a famous Korean TV show “Running Man”.

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(Photo credit to Borninunion.com, some rights reserved.)

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(Photo credit to wowbarbecue.com, some rights reserved.)