One Cannabis Collection, Seeks Loving Home

Oh, the humanity: Oaksterdam University's collection of marijuana artifacts is about to become homeless. The cannabis teaching college was founded in 2007 to "provide students with the highest quality training for the cannabis industry”—and suffered a recent federal raid. The group has several auditoriums, classrooms and grow labs at its home site on Broadway St. in Oakland, California. The associated Oaksterdam Cannabis and Hemp Museum highly-valued by cannabis aficionados also occupies this space; but the exhibit area, sponsored by Richard Lee—the founder of Oaksterdam University and sponsor of California’s doomed Proposition 19 initiative to legalize marijuana—will be gone by the end of the month. “We’re looking for the right permanent location,” says Oaksterdam's chancellor, Dale Sky Jones. “Considering the current national situation, it is unthinkable we could allow the center for knowledge and American history to go into storage.” Unthinkable, too, to museum curator Chris Conrad, a former curator of the Hash Marihuana Hemp Museum of Amsterdam, who says that the Oaksterdam museum has amassed “the best collection of artifacts about hemp, cannabis as medicine, and the direct results of marijuana prohibition that I have seen on public display in North America.” The museum has put out a distress call for donors. Sounds like a candidate for the National Historic Landmarks roster.