Minot State University science students are at work in the lab. The university has added medicinal plant chemistry option for chemistry majors, partly in response to legalization of medicinal cannabis in North Dakota. Submitted photos

Minot State University is offering a program that might be right up the alley of people who are interested in the state’s fledgling medicinal marijuana industry.

But Chris Heth, a chemistry professor at Minot State, is quick to emphasize that the university’s new medicinal plant chemistry option in its bachelor of arts in chemistry program is “not a weed degree.”

“We’re not interested in MSU being Marijuana State University or anything like that,” said Heth, who said it is a rigorous chemistry degree with all of the requirements of the other science degree programs at Minot State.

Minot State will begin listing the medicinal plant chemistry option in its course catalogue beginning this fall, but students can already list it as part of their major now.

Legalization of medicinal marijuana in North Dakota was “one of the motivations, but not the only, reason for the program at Minot State,” said Heth.

He said the university began discussions about the program about a year ago and professors discovered that it was a field where there was potential for growth. A university in Michigan was offering a four-year program in the field at the time but Minot State will be the second university in the country to offer such a program.

Because marijuana is still illegal at the federal level, each state that has legalized medicinal or recreational marijuana must have its own industry and is unable to work with other states.

“The program was designed to teach students what they need to know to work in areas extracting, purifying, and analyzing things that come from plants,” said Heth. “So that could apply to a number of industries, the pharmaceutical industry being one of them because the analytical skills are the same ones that people working for pharmaceutical companies would use to test drugs to make sure that they are pure before they are packaged and sold, for example.

Heth said the brewing industry would be another option for graduates of the program, as the extraction of things from hops fits in with the degree.

Graduates could also potentially find employment in the botanical and health supplements industries.

“Our focus is on the science of the processing of the materials,” Heth said. “We’re not focused on growing of any particular plants. While we may grow some things for use in analysis, our current focus is not on the growing part and it’s not specifically on the medicine part, trying to learn what diseases and conditions various compounds are useful for. We’ll learn something of both of those but the focus is on the middle part. We have someone (who’s) grown the plant and harvested it and … someone needs to take it and put it into a form that a patient or a consumer will want and use. That’s the part of the process that we’re focusing on.”

Heth said it would be too complicated to get permission to grow marijuana on campus, but the university is researching the possibility of growing the closely related industrialized hemp.

The 2018 Farm Bill changes the federal government’s policy regarding growing hemp, which produces similar compounds to marijuana but does not have the psychoactive compound THC.

Hops might also make a good analog.

Heth said the program will potentially be a good recruiting tool for the university and could attract students from other states who are interested in the major.

“The technical skills and the scientific background that they’ll gain while doing this will be useful anywhere,” said Heth. “The science doesn’t change regardless of what the state laws are. It’ll apply wherever.”

Medicinal cannabis is also potentially a well paid field.

Heth said the starting salary for a technician with this kind of education might run about $70,000 per year in some areas.