Medical Marijuana response

I guess I'm not entirely sure what the Time article we read for today's (canceled) class, "Medical-Marijuana Schools Grow New Industry in Michigan," was supposed to teach us. The story was definitely the most newsy thing we've read in the semester thus far, and it was certainly competent, but it failed to grab my attention. An unaccredited college that teaches kids how to grow pot could be fodder for a really juicy, interesting feature piece, but the only thought that I walked away from this article with was "Oh, that's something that exists. Huh."

From a style perspective, there's not a ton to talk about, but the journalism is quite solid. There's lots of good quotes and sources, and some of the anecdotes – like the 52-year-old student whose stash and grow lamps were stolen – were pretty interesting. I suppose this was meant to be an example of extending a news story to magazine length and adding a little bit of the analysis that a magazine can offer. Its relative objectivity was comparable to that of "The Girl Who Conned the Ivy League," but the story wasn't nearly as inherently interesting.

Furthermore, the content of the story is a little bit eye-roll-worthy, in my opinion. A whole bunch of dudes rented space across the street from a KFC to grow weed and are calling it a college? It's great that people who need medical marijuana in Michigan are able to obtain it, but this kind of seems like glorifying pot subculture and trying to put a stamp of officialdom on it, and nothing drives me up the wall quite like that. It's like if NORML could give out fake diplomas. I realize this is ancillary to the point, but it certainly didn't help my thoughts on the article.

I thought the journalism work done for this article was pretty good, but at the end of the day, I just wasn't that high on the total package. Huh-huh. I said high.