US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

Here in Canada, it has been rather eye opening the extent of cannabis use. There are more cannabis shops then mcdonalds. You can grow your own and most people do. There's online options.

A society which criminalizes something so popular and widely used; will ultimately fail at their prohibition.

The next step for society would be to attempt at changing opinion, but what are the unintended consequences? The answer is, bad news.

But there's as many shuttered pot shops in Toronto as there are open ones. I think the industry is still shaking out and there's a lot of volatility.

There's a common notion that I've noticed, which is that if you just open up a "pot shop" that you'll make money hand over fist, meanwhile, they're fairly complex retail operations to run and you can loose your hat just as quickly as with any other business.

Same thing happened with cupcake shops and craft breweries.

You think most people in Canada grow weed?

While this is true, the remaining stores are continuing to capture more business. Users who only make legal source purchases are over 70% of the market now https://globalnews.ca/news/10367758/legal-cannabis-sales-pro...

> You can grow your own and most people do

pffft... source? I know about 1 person who grows their own for every 100 who smoke.

I read that as "most people [who smoke weed] grow their own". Also a bold statement but way less absurd than "most Canadians grow weed".

I grew weed durring covid, it's like taking care of a baby for weed that's mostly OK. I sold everything after two attempts. I learned alot about gardening though lol

Except cupcake shops and craft breweries are allowed to differentiate (gluten free, superhero themed, we only sell wild fermented German beers...) while the legal cannabis retailers in Canada are more akin to owning a Subway franchise.

You must purchase your cannabis from a select set of suppliers chosen by the government (yes, the very same ones your competition must purchase from), you are not allowed to offer discounts/freebies on cannabis products (only rolling papers or similar non-psychoactive products). It is still illegal to operate any kind of venue that allows consumption, so while you can decorate your retail space like an Apple store or a Pier 1, you can't run trivia nights or do movie screenings or anything that might result in people patronizing your business over the one next door offering the same product for $0.05 cheaper.

Pre-legalization, I could go to a store (not legally operated) and look at the bud in the jar, smell it, and make decisions based on something other than a sealed package with no artwork or description on it. Some stores even offered consumption of "dabs" which is a great model: those things cost a lot of money and aren't really fun to have in your home and maintain, and it was very competitive with "a pint after work". All of this went away after 2017.

It’s not a particularly easy industry to value add. Growing pretty good weed is probably less work than a brewery - and I have a very hard time telling the difference between the hundreds of different strains.

Then you have to have security, your staff is high 24/7, banking is a mess..

Growing might be more pleasant than running the shops but then you better like agriculture

I visited Montreal last year and finding a recreation cannabis shop was not easy. Google maps is filled with "head shops" that don't sell weed, and apparently at some point all shops became nationalized (correct me if I'm wrong) which means there were private shops in existence but then shut down further polluting online listings. I eventually figured this out (after visiting what I thought was a cannabis shop that was actually a deli) but as luck would have it, they were all closed when I was downtown.

Coming from the US, Massachusetts specifically this was a major step backwards. Granted we are spoiled, especially in my region where there's 2-3 shops per town but I was not expecting it to be that hard in progressive Canada.

Edit: I looked it up and only the "SQDC" (1) is authorized to sell Cannabis. 1: https://www.quebec.ca/sante/conseils-et-prevention/alcool-dr...

"A society which criminalizes something so popular and widely used; will ultimately fail at their prohibition."

So .. all the countries in the world, e.g. Japan, China, Singapore, UAE, etc., etc., where marijuana is very illegal, failed? It seems to be working just fine for them. Since we can provide numerous counter examples to your claim isn't your claim instantly invalidated?

I'm referring more to the "several times as many as the market can sustain get opened" phenomenon. Around here, every just-out-of-college set of buddies decided they'd get into brewing a few years ago. Probably 75% of them were gone in a year or two.

> Here in Canada, it has been rather eye opening the extent of cannabis use.

When I visited Quebec in 1997, I saw a lot of people openly smoking cannabis in public. Once I smelt weed, turned around, and saw a kid, probably about 12-14, just sitting on a bench in public smoking a joint. I wasn't in a shady part of town, either.

>I visited Montreal last year and finding a recreation cannabis shop was not easy. Google maps is filled with "head shops" that don't sell weed, and apparently at some point all shops became nationalized (correct me if I'm wrong)

Quebec is an oddball, they did provincially run them. They are quite available still, search 'cannabis' in google/apple maps and they'll be available.

>But there's as many shuttered pot shops in Toronto as there are open ones. I think the industry is still shaking out and there's a lot of volatility.

That's fair as well. Being invested in cannabis is a whole other beast.