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An Entrepreneur Asks Her Customers To Arrive High At 'The Goodship Academy Of Higher Education'

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Remember that super intense conversation you had stoned in your dorm room? Imagine that experience in a lecture hall where the foremost expert on a technological or cultural topic is leading the conversation and the whole audience is high. Now meet Jody Hall who wants to take you there.

Hall can make a delicious cannabis cookie. But what this entrepreneur really wants is to see legal marijuana integrated into American society in a positive way. “Pot will eventually be as commonplace as alcohol and cigarettes,” she said, “It can be a party experience, but there is also a place for marijuana in a more sophisticated setting.” Hall is doing her part to make that sophistication a reality though a series of events where attendees are invited to arrive high, and through her upscale marijuana edibles company.

The “Goodship Academy of Higher Education,” percolating in Seattle’s hip urban Capitol Hill neighborhood may provide a glimpse of the future Hall has in mind for cannabis. She has been collaborating with Greg Lundgren and other cannabis enthusiasts to create a lecture series where “heady topics” are discussed by local artists, philanthropists and inventors with an audience that is high on marijuana. The first lecture will feature the head of machine intelligence at Google talking about how the company is using AI technology around gender issues.

“The series is about exploring the world through the lens of Marijuana,” said Hall. People are distracted by the list of things they need to do and the list of things they forgot to do she said, “Marijuana can help them focus and be present -- to really listen closely to the music they are listening to, taste the food they are eating or communicate with the person in front of them.”

Limited to 75 attendees as Hall and Lundgren test the concept, the pair hopes to expand to larger venues and bring in topics like modernist cuisine and space travel to audiences who have come “pre-boarded on the goodship,” i.e. high. The lectures will be for people twenty-one and up and designed to facilitate cultural conversations with everyone “from hipsters to oldsters,” Hall said.

Hall is also trying to elevate marijuana’s image by creating upscale cannabis cookies and chocolates “in lovely packaging, that you could bring to a nice dinner party instead of a bottle of wine,” she said. Those chocolate and cookie products created under the Goodship brand name need be a “delicious treat, not a sawdust cookie you just choke down with some milk to get high,” she said, “It’s more than just a delivery method.

Hall said she uses top-grade ingredients, employs experienced bakers, and operates the latest in quality control systems to ensure the consistency of her products’ flavors and cannabis dosage. “If you are a half-cookie person, you should get equally high no matter which half you eat,” she said.

Hall’s previous merchandising experience at Starbucks corporate headquarters and as owner of the Cupcake Royale stores (selling non-marijuana cupcakes for 11 years) are coming to bear as her cannabis cookies and chocolates are sold in over 100 Washington state recreational retail marijuana stores.

The potential market for marijuana is enormous, said Hall but its reputation as a legal substance is a work in progress. “There’s still a lot of stigma around using marijuana but that is falling away and there are so many people out there who want to try it,” she said. Now is the time to help people see marijuana as a safe way to experience their senses she said, “I want to help people see that they can experience food, music, and ideas in a profoundly different way.”