Greta Carter is the founder and president of Cannabis Training Institute.
By Garrett Rudolph
For years, Greta Carter traveled the path of a typical, traditional business woman, enjoying successful careers in international banking and real estate. Nowadays, she remains every bit the business woman, but “traditional” is a rapidly evolving standard.
Since 2009, she has been an outspoken voice in the cannabis industry, which has led her into a number of advocacy roles and business ventures, including Cannabis Training Institute.
Carter’s path to launching an online school dedicated to the cannabis industry began with her own educational journey.
“What happened was a long educational process I went through to understand what is propaganda and what is real, and it was very, very challenging to find it,” Carter said. “When I did find it, it was abundantly clear that this was the direction I wanted to go. This is something I was passionate about, being in the world of cannabis and drug policy reform. So it really boiled down to sharing with others that there is a source out there that is separating propaganda and myth.”
Cannabis Training Institute offers courses on a variety of subjects, including business plan writing, cultivation, cannabis as medicine, real estate, law and politics.
It’s a market that’s becoming increasingly crowded, with schools and seminars popping up all around the country, but Carter has helped assemble an impressive team at CTI.
The school’s advisory board includes Dominic Corva, Mike McGinn, Rachel Kurtz, Steph Sherer, Michelle Sexton and Jeff Tice.
“I do take pride in our advisory committee. They’re very deep and rich with decades and decades of documented cannabis experience and laws and governing,” Carter said. “There are no egos on our team. I wanted it to be about the education. I didn’t want it to be about the personalities.”
Marijuana Venture: What’s the focal point of these courses, and who are going to be the people that would benefit the most?
Greta Carter: We are about a year and a half old, so we are going to continue to grow our curriculum. I think what you see now is 50 modules of information out there and of course our goal is to have 500.
What you’re seeing first is, let’s give folks the fundamentals of understanding cannabis. It’s not propaganda, it’s not hype. I’m not selling something. I’m not trying to sell my consulting services. I’m not selling you my legal services. I’m just giving you access to really good, quality education at an affordable price.
What we are seeing is that there are two pretty distinct populations of interest. … If I were to look at the top two profiles that are interested, it’s definitely when we see states that are coming up on legalization on medical laws. They want to understand and they want to get the facts and they want to show that they were serious about it, so they went to a serious source for education. … The other group is existing dispensary owners and they want to separate themselves from others in the industry by saying, ‘We have actually sent our employees through a course, and they know how to speak the language of cannabis without calling it the street jargon or referencing myths versus facts.’
MV: There seems to be a lot of misleading statements from groups that are both for and against cannabis. The anti-cannabis crowd spreads propaganda about how dangerous and damaging the plant is, and the pro-cannabis crowd makes it sounds like there are no harms whatsoever.
Carter: You hit the nail on the head in describing those two populations. The first population that are scared and fearful and want to say no, they need the education more than anybody does, because … you can’t just go out there and do an Internet search. … Based on what your own personality is, you can find anything out there to support it.
Those folks unfortunately are finding things that are not true about the plant being harmful and extremely addictive and deteriorating society and all of that. And we do need to educate them. …
I’m sitting in an incredibly utopian environment in Seattle and we have legalized (cannabis) and we’re surrounded by permissive people. We understand it, but that can be a danger too, because the fact of the matter is that it’s a federally illegal substance. To go into it not understanding that is a false sense of security.
We try to put that out there and hopefully we stay on top of it.
MV: There are obviously a lot more states that have legalized medical marijuana, compared to just Washington and Colorado that have so far legalized cannabis for recreational use. How do you juggle the differences there, or has that been much of a factor yet? How do you tackle those two sides of the industry?
Carter: It’s an interesting little paradigm that’s going on. The real fact of the matter is that the plant is the same whether it’s medical cannabis or whether it’s adult use. Understanding the basics of writing a business plan is the same regardless of whether you’re in medical.
So these are what our modules are doing, teaching how to write a business plan for medical cannabis, and then we also teach you how to look for real estate, not just for medical, but for adult use as well.
So we tell you about the challenges in real estate and how you protect yourself. … When you get state specific, then you absolutely have to be cognizant of medical laws. There are a lot of generalities out there about the plant and how you get into the business piece of it and understanding it and we have courses for that. The courses we have out there now, that we give our certification out there for, quite frankly, are not for adult-use cannabis laws that are in Colorado or Washington. They really are geared toward medical cannabis laws and our next evolution will be to appeal to those recreational states. Our region is much bigger than just Colorado or just Washington or just adult use or just medical.
It’s about the plant. We’re on a path for accreditation. We want to build curriculum that will allow us in a couple years — and that’s a long and tedious and onerous path to go down — but we want to build that kind of caliber of discipline when we write our courses, so that within a few years, you’ll be able to say, ‘I got my bachelor’s degree with a focus on cannabis.’
MV: That would obviously be a pretty substantial step, both for you CTI and the industry to bridge the gap between traditional university-type course work and this industry that has largely been underground.
Carter: It’s been underground for a long time. What’s exciting to me is that there are a lot of subject matter experts who knock on my door to get their knowledge put out there. It’s long overdue. We’ve got to get it out of the basement and out of the garages.
People are looking at (cannabis) as an option in business and careers, and education as well.
MV: It’s an industry that is going to move forward one way or another, but how important is it for CTI to be able to help shape it in a proper direction?
Carter: I’m ashamed sometimes of what I’m seeing for seminars that are offered to desperately hungry folks who want to know about cannabis. I’ve spent the last six or seven months in Florida, and I’ll use Florida as a prime example. There are people, honest to god, if they grew a plant in their basement 10 years ago, all of a sudden they’re advertising themselves as an expert and they’re selling seminars for $400 a ticket. And then asking outside of that, ‘If you want to talk to me personally, another $500 an hour, we can get one on one time.’
That is representative to me of the days when Florida had to put a whole bunch of laws around real estate because of the swamp deals that were being done.
It embarrasses me.
If you’ve done anything in Florida, you know how ugly it is down there with these seminars. … You want to know who you’re buying your courses and your education from, Google them, and if they haven’t been doing something to progress this plant for the last 10 years, stay away from them. They’re profiteers.
MV: The cannabis industry is evolving so rapidly that somebody could potentially be left behind the curve if they’re not continually educating themselves. Is that part of CTI’s mission?
Carter: I tell people, and my background is business, that you need to let go of your traditional five- and 10-year business plans. In the world of cannabis, long-term planning is a year, short-term planning is six months. They laugh at me, and I say, ‘No, it’s because every year is when new laws come out in the legislative process and every year, things are going to change.’ And I also tell people from a business standpoint, if you don’t have a line item that is for government relations work, you’re being irresponsible. You need to be able to be at the forefront of trying to influence what those laws are going to be if you think you are going to be doing business in this industry.
If you are not going to be participating in that change, that’s just stupid business. … It’s rapidly changing, but you know what? That’s what makes it so much fun.