GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP — With spring here — and legal recreational cannabis sales nearly here — students, business owners, lobbyists and activists are working to cultivate the Garden State’s newest industry.
Stockton University hosted a Cannabis Career Fair and Expo on Tuesday at its Campus Center. Organized in partnership with the New Jersey CannaBusiness Association and NJ Cannabis Insider, the expo was meant to introduce students and other interested community members to the New Jersey marijuana industry. A wide array of businesses was in attendance, including cultivators, educators, financial advisers, researchers and retailers.
Scott Rudder, founder of the CannaBusiness Association, delivered the keynote address. A former Republican assemblyman and Lockheed Martin executive, Rudder said he began to embrace marijuana as he came to learn more about its effects and the effects of its criminalization.
“This journey, to be quite frank, is not something that I thought I was going to be part of until I got here, and then I started to learn more about what cannabis really is and is not,” Rudder said.
One of the businesses attending was TerrAscend, a company with locations in California, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Maryland, along with New Jersey, that does work in cultivation, manufacturing and retail. Representatives Lauren Matos and Kelly McCullough said the company has more than 1,000 employees and plans to expand and develop new strains, especially as New Jersey begins awarding licenses to retailers for recreational marijuana.
“There’s just so much movement and growth right now,” Matos said. “It’s a really, really exciting time to get involved.”
As yet, retail cannabis sales are not legal in New Jersey. Though voters approved a referendum in 2020 legalizing recreational marijuana, regulators are still plotting a way forward for the industry. Late last month, Jeff Brown, executive director of the state Cannabis Regulatory Commission, said sales are on the way but there remain issues to address.
Stockton offers a cannabis studies minor, through which students can take on an interdisciplinary curriculum to learn more about the marijuana industry.
Passion to learn more about marijuana was on display at the table of Gaetano Lardieri, founder of Technology Healthcare Business Delegation, or THCBD, a company researching synthetic cannabinoids. Lardieri donned a hemp hat emblazoned with a marijuana leaf as he told passersby about his company.
“There’s so much innovation that’s ahead of us,” Lardieri said.
As the cannabis industry develops, it will heighten demand for people with financial and regulatory expertise as well. Monica Sargent, marketing administrator of the mid-Atlantic region for HBK CPA & Consultants, said new marijuana entrepreneurs will need advice on how to finance and operate a business, especially given the complicated legal environment surrounding marijuana.
Representatives from NJ Cannabis Certified were also on hand to give people instructions on how to access the company’s virtual classes. The group has partnerships with several schools in New Jersey, including Atlantic Cape Community College and Rowan College of South Jersey.
GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP — The application pool for marijuana retail licenses opened earlier this m…
One of the themes reiterated during the expo Tuesday was the notion of equity — efforts to compensate people who have been impacted by criminalization policies that marijuana activists have denounced as a draconian war on drugs. At one of the expo tables was Michael Hoffman, founder of The Hoffman Centers, or THC, and Chirali Patel of Blaze Responsibly. The two lawyers were offering to expunge the records of any attendee with certain marijuana-related charges on their criminal records. While many of those records were automatically expunged by the state when it enacted its new marijuana policies, tens of thousands, Hoffman said, have slipped through the cracks.
Ensuring equity in the new industry was also the stated mission of Alexandra Verello of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 360, which works to organize South Jersey marijuana workers. A marijuana cultivator herself, Verello said she was passionate about marijuana growth and wanted to organize industry workers, saying she was concerned the new multistate organizations coming to New Jersey would exploit workers.
“I came out to do this activism work because I realized that people like me need a voice,” Verello said.
Stockton biology professor Ekaterina Sedia is the coordinator of the university’s cannabis studies minor. In a news release about the expo, she underscored the importance of people entering the brave new world of legal marijuana.
“It is our responsibility as educators to ensure that our students have a wide knowledge base to prepare them for the ever-changing world, but also to give them enough skills to take advantage of novel employment opportunities,” Sedia said.
GALLERY: Cannabis Career Fair and Expo at Stockton University
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Cannabis Career Fair and Expo at Stockton University
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Stockton University hosts a Cannabis Career Fair and Expo on Tuesday at its Campus Center in Galloway Township.
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