Legal Cannabis in Canada; One Week Later
One week ago today, Canada became the second country to legalize cannabis use and so far Canadians seem to be handling the transition well. Stats Canada indicates that 5.4 million or approximately 15% of Canadians will buy cannabis from licensed retailers this year.
Photo by Chase Fade on Unsplash
So what have we learned in the past week since cannabis legalization?
We’ll Stand in Line for Cannabis
Canadians are willing to line up for hours (in some cases) to buy weed. long lineups were reported in Montreal, Edmonton, Calgary and St. John’s. Online Twitter users uploaded screenshots of the number of people ahead of them lined up to buy legal weed from provincial websites. In some cases it was thousands of buyers.
Within the first hour of operations, the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis website received 1,040 cannabis orders and more than 4,000 orders by 11:00 a.m. local time, according to a spokesperson.
We’ll Spend a lot of money
Some estimates put the amount of money spent on Cannabis on day one to be around $1,802,908.00. That’s just on day one and doesn’t include data from all of the provinces and territories. Five stores in Alberta are said to have raked in over $100,000,00 in the first five days of legalization. In total, about 172,000 orders were made in the five provinces that have so far published sales figures from Oct. 17
Experts are predicting that cannabis will be a $6 billion industry in Canada.
If you’re curious, Global News has a run down of what cannabis will cost per gram in each province.
We’ll Probably Run out of Cannabis
“It’s a mess. The supply is just a mess,” Patrick Wallace, owner of the Alberta shop Waldo’s 420 Store, told CBC. A study of the cannabis industry by University of Waterloo and the CD Howe Institute found licensed producers would only be able to meet up to 60 per cent of demand in the first year of legalisation.
Take heart, if you have the space and you live in a municipality that is open to it, you can grow your up to four plants of your own at home.
A lot of Us Think Weed is Sexy
This one is a slightly different stat but fascinating nonetheless. According to Pornhub on October 17, searches for cannabis related terms were 206% higher than average in Canada. The maritimes led the charge which, when you think about it does make an awful lot of sense as those provinces were first to legalize. When compared to the rest of the world, Canadians are 224% more likely to search for cannabis related terms, Kenya is ranked most likely to search weed and sex.
Popular search terms included “ganja girls” “weed sex” “horny weed” and the ever romantic “smoking weed blowjob”.