Rene Van Acker is hoping marijuana will prove a gateway drug for targeted generations of young people — horticultural students.In launching the first university lab in Canada dedicated to cannabis production, the dean of the Ontario Agricultural College believes the chance to study pot will entice budding plant scientists in a way that flax or soybeans never could.“With this topic in particular, I think there’s a possibility of attracting all kinds of people to the field that may not have thought about being involved in plant research,” says Van Acker, whose college is part of the University of Guelph.“They’d be like, ‘Plant research, that sounds not as exciting as I’m looking for, but cannabis research, that catches my attention,’” he says.Christened the Guelph Centre for Cannabis Research, the incipient lab will likely take two years to become fully operational. It will look at the breeding, production, processing and storage of cannabis and will work with veterinary and human health professionals on campus. It will include both graduate and undergraduate students.Van Acker says the coming legalization of recreational cannabis on Oct. 17 will normalize the product and plant it firmly within the field of everyday Canadian crops.“We view this as just an expansion of the agriculture and food sector,” he says. “And so we view it very positively in that respect. And our involvement has been with an industry that is very serious (and) wants to employ science.”Read more: How much pot is consumed in your Toronto neighbourhood? Check our interactive mapWe need more help with cannabis rollout, provinces tell OttawaNunavut’s new official name for cannabis — ‘surrarnaqtuq’ — leaves some with bad buzzUntil recently, clandestine growers have had to rely on homespun techniques to optimize the growth of their plants and to tailor the hundreds of constituent psycho ...
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