William Dolphin, Faculty Researcher at Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research – Interview Series

As the cannabis industry matures and normalization expands, so too do the academic institutions dedicated to researching the plant in rigorous detail. One such institution is the fittingly located Cal Poly Humboldt. Situated in a region with a rich history of cultivation, the university’s programs offer an immense depth of direct experience that other institutions may lack.

To gain a greater understanding of the university’s work in cannabis science and history, mycannabis.com had the pleasure of speaking with William Dolphin.

What were your favorite subjects you got to study and write about while obtaining your MA at San Francisco State University? As an author, who would you say some of your main influences are?

My masters work was on teaching academic writing, so among the subjects I studied were literacy acquisition and language theory, both of which have socio-cultural aspects I found appealing. How language shapes culture and perceptions was fascinating. It was during my grad school studies in the mid ‘90s that I became interested in the medicinal uses of cannabis. That was due to the experiences of a close friend who was going through the late stages of an HIV-Hepatis C co-infection and had found that a  little cannabis provided as much pain relief as the opioids he was being prescribed, but without feeling dead inside. As much as it helped, he was also worried that getting busted might mean losing the disability on which he depended. I told him I’d look into it. I was shocked to discover I knew far less about cannabis than I thought I did, largely because my government had been systematically lying to me. Discovering “hidden” knowledge about cannabis was exciting then and remains so today. 

How did your studies at both San Francisco State and the University of Northern Colorado strengthen your skills as an editor and communications consultant?

I began working as a writer as an undergrad at UNC. I started writing an opinion page column, then became Editorial Page editor, News editor, and finally Managing Editor. The demands of producing copy on deadline taught me how to write under pressure, organize information for efficient reading, and be more concise and direct. Producing 1,500 word columns three times a week also taught me something about finding fresh ideas. 

What courses and topics did you serve as a professor/lecturer for? What do you believe was unique about each of the schools you worked at in your early years of lecturing?

I’ve been teaching classes in the Cannabis studies Program at Cal Poly Humboldt for a few years now, including Introduction to Cannabis Studies, Global Cannabis, Cannabis and Social Equity, Cannabis Law and Policy, and Cannabis as a Medicinal Plant. Each of those classes has been gratifying to teach, as they have given me a chance to put to use the broad range of things I’ve learned about cannabis and the people who use it. I also teach and introductory class in the Cannabis Operations associates degree program at Mt San Antonio College, California’s largest community college. Before that, most of my teaching has been about how to write good academic essays, but my interest in cannabis was already present in those classes. I found it to be a fantastic topic for teaching persuasive, evidence-based writing, and students consistently found it interesting and engaging. For the past decade, I’ve also been teaching a graduate seminar in research methods at University of Redlands, which involves doing a literature review and designing a pilot empirical study. 

I’ve taught at several schools during my career, ranging from a small private liberal arts college in the South to UC Berkeley. There are substantial differences in campus culture and student demographics among those schools. The diversity of students I’ve encountered has been remarkable and has taught me much.

As a book editor, what were the most important cannabis-related books that you helped publish/edit, and why were those books so groundbreaking for cannabis normalization?

Most of the cannabis-related books I’ve contributed to as an editor were titles from Ed Rosenthal, the long-time writer on all things related to cannabis cultivation. All of those are trade books aimed at providing practical information. Among them were the Big Book of Buds series that highlight exotic cannabis varieties from around the world with information about their suitability to various environments, time to flower, and other things a grower would want to know. I also worked on books about turning trim into edibles and extracts, various indoor lighting options, and pest management. His Ask Ed books were helpful with normalizing in that they were compilations of his self-help column from High Times magazine that treated growing cannabis as just gardening. I particularly enjoyed working on his book Why Marijuana Should be Legal because of its focus on persuasion and public policy (PPHC ). 

In terms of normalization, those books were less important than the federal trial that made me interested in working for Ed in the first place. My role was writing a trial diary and doing media relations. This was in 2001 and the Clinton Administration was trying to squelch the growing medical marijuana movement. The raid on Ed and other medical providers in the Bay Area was timed to the day the then-head of the DEA, Asa Hutchinson, was delivering a speech at the Commonwealth Club. They were looking to make an example of him that would get press, but little did they realize how much they would get, or how it would work against them. Ed is a true believer who was looking for this fight. He was not about to take the plea deal all the other defendants agreed to because he was sure he could change the law. Since cannabis was then and remains still federally illegal, no evidence could be introduced in a federal trial about compliance with a state cannabis law, medical or otherwise. But Ed’s case was unusual. 

The City of Oakland had deputized Ed as an officer of the city to “enforce” its medical marijuana ordinance that called for the distribution of the plant to qualifying patients. In doing that, city officials hoped to shield him from federal prosecution because the law that makes cannabis illegal federally, the Controlled Substances Act, specifies in paragraph 885(d) that any duly deputized officers — federal, state, or local — are immune from criminal liability while enforcing drug laws. That’s so an undercover cop making a buy isn’t committing a trafficking crime, or an evidence clerk bringing drugs into a courtroom isn’t guilty of possession. Unfortunately, the judge wasn’t having it, though. He memorably ruled in a pretrial hearing that, yes, that’s what the law says, but that’s not what it means. So everything about the deputization, as well as the fact that it was all strictly medical, the jury would not hear. All that was relevant was whether it was marijuana in the warehouse, whether Ed owned the warehouse, and whether he’d talked to anyone about it. Since all three were indisputably true, it took the jury no time to find him guilty of three felony counts. That’s when it got really wild. 

When the jurors left the courthouse, they were confronted with a media scrum and dozens of medical marijuana advocates protesting with signs and giant puppets. From those activists and the reporters, they quickly learned the details of the case that the judge had kept from them. Within 24 hours, nine of the jurors had publicly recanted their verdict. They were interviewed for dozens of stories and ended up on CNN and Dateline denouncing the trial as a travesty of justice. When it came time for sentencing, they collectively wrote a letter to the judge asking him to do justice because they had not been allowed to. On the day of sentencing, the judge emerged from his chambers to find those jurors sitting in the row behind Ed’s defense table, all wearing buttons that read “Ed is a Hero.” The prosecution had asked for 6 years in federal prison, no chance of parole. The judge had different ideas. He noted that this was a first offense, that there were no other drugs or any weapons, and, most importantly, that Ed had been deputized by the City of Oakland and reasonably believed that granted him federal immunity. Then he turned to the probation officer who had done the sentencing report and asked how long Ed had been held before making bail. Was it more than 24 hours? The answer was yes, it was 36 hours. “Ok,” the judge said. “I hereby sentence you to one day in jail, with credit for time served. You are free to go.”

Ultimately, Ed was left with three felony convictions, but the media attention his trial got — including front page coverage in the New York Times and all the Bay Area papers – changed how the issue was handled by the media. Before that, any article about medicinal use would say “so-called medical marijuana” or just put the word “medical” in scare quotes. After the trial, journalists reported on it without those markers of skepticism. The issue and the people it affected were now treated as legitimate. That also started successive efforts in Congress to modify federal law to at least allow people to testify in federal court that they were in compliance with state law. None of those bills passed, but eventually we got the Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment that prevents the Department of Justice from using any taxpayer funds to “interfere” with state medical marijuana laws. That stopped the DEA from kicking down dispensary doors and handcuffing wheelchair-bound grandmas.

In your early years as a professor, long before any state had recreationally legalized cannabis, did you ever envision there would be degree programs dedicated to cannabis studies?

Yes and no. We’ve been waiting a long time. Jimmy Carter promised federal decriminalization when he ran for President in 1976. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but it sowed the seed of hope. I’m also naively optimistic about people’s ability to be compassionate and rational, so I’ve always thought that other people would someday see through the lies and stigma, just like I had. 

As a writer yourself, what journals and publications have your works been published in, and what subjects have you mainly written about?

Much of my professional writing life has been spent on work that does not bear my name. That includes four medical textbook chapters related to cannabis and its use, as well as a considerable volume of work for a medical cannabis advocacy non-profit, Americans for Safe Access. ASA was formed in response to the raid on Ed and other Bay Area providers, and after his trial, they recruited me to help with communications work for them. That meant many press releases like I’d written for Ed’s case, pamphlets on treating various conditions, policy white papers, OpEds, and a monthly newsletter for which I interviewed patients and caregivers about their experiences. I did that work for 20 years. 

During that time, I turned more of my academic work toward cannabis and wrote a public health article with a pair of doctors on labeling of CBD products that appeared in the journal Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research and has been cited frequently. My most important publication is The Medicalization of Marijuana: Legitimacy, Stigma, and the Patient Experience, a book I co-authored with my partner, Dr. Michelle Newhart. Based on research she conducted in Colorado among middle-aged patients enrolled in the state’s medical cannabis program, we showed that people use cannabis much like they do other medicines, but they have to work to claim legitimacy, to not be dismissed as “stoners.” That book has been cited by many other academics, so we know it is influencing how people understand the issues it raises.  

After many years in higher education, what interested you about the Cannabis Studies Program at Cal Poly Humboldt? What academic value did you see in the Cannabis Studies Program?

My partner Michelle and I were recruited to teach in the Cannabis Studies program because of our long work in the area among activists, combined with our academic backgrounds. The chance to apply what we’ve learned in the classroom has been rewarding. Even more exciting has been the opportunity we’ve been given to develop curriculum for the program. We’ve designed a four-course series focused on medical cannabis that we’ve begun teaching. Michelle did the intro class last semester, and I’m currently teaching Cannabis as a Medicinal Plant, which explores the biochemistry of cannabis and how it interacts with the complex endogenous cannabinoid system all animals have. This is an area of emerging science and understanding in all its aspects, and it’s fair to say we’re in the middle of a paradigm change in our understanding of what the use of the plant entails. Public attitudes are also changing quickly, as is public policy, so having a program based in the social sciences is useful for capturing all the ways this historic change is manifesting.

What are the most commonly taught subjects as part of the Cannabis Studies Program? 

The Cannabis Studies Program offers both a major and a minor with differing concentrations. Students choose between courses focused on social and environmental responsibility. Those range from classes with a global focus to local Humboldt history, ones about law, policy, and equity to ones about managing natural resources. The Introduction to Cannabis Studies course has proven popular with students drawn from many majors. 

Why is it beneficial to the Cannabis Studies Program that it’s taught mainly at Cal Poly Humboldt, one of the areas most famous for cannabis cultivation, and how does the location add strength and legitimacy to the program?

Being located at Cal Poly Humboldt certainly provides access to legacy operators and a community with a rich history of involvement with cannabis. The environmental stewardship part of the program has much to work with due to the history of trespass grows in public lands and their impacts on local flora and fauna. Many of the students who take Cannabis Studies classes have local roots and bring exceptional insights to the classes. 

Where do you see collegiate programs in cannabis studies going in the future, especially post-federal rescheduling? What subjects will be discussed and taught more in future years as opposed to now?

Cannabis has the potential to disrupt virtually all industries, so I hope to see more integration into existing disciplines as it becomes more normalized. Medicine has much work to do to better understand the endocannabinoid system and how it can be targeted in treatments, as well as in the development of cannabinoid medicines. A critical part of that is integrating cannabis into medical school curricula. Doctors still receive virtually no training on cannabis and its potential, most cannot tell you the difference between THC and CBD, and many have no idea what the endocannabinoid system is or what it does, even though it constitutes the master regulator of homeostasis in the body. The construction industry will hopefully embrace the wonders of hempcrete and similar eco-friendly building options. Similarly with any number of other applications for what we can call industrial hemp. Nonetheless, I see a continuing place for interdisciplinary programs like the one the Cal Poly Humboldt has created because the issues surrounding the plant and its use are so complex and touch so many dimensions of human experience. 

Thank you for joining us, William! For more information on the Cannabis Studies program at Cal Poly Humboldt, please visit its website.