Canada's legal weed struggles to light up as smokers stick to black market
Six months after legalisation, licensed producers are unable to keep up with the demand or quality of neighborhood dealers
Wednesday, April 17, 2019
When Melissa, a resident of Halifax, Nova Scotia, went to one of Canada’s first government cannabis stores, she wasn’t impressed. “You can’t look at what they have. You can’t smell the product,” she said. “It’s too expensive.” And so she, like tens of thousand of other Canadians, went back to their old habits: buying from neighbourhood dealers. Six months after Canada became the first G7 country to legalise marijuana, the bold experiment is still struggling to get off the ground. Legal producers were unable to meet the sudden surge in demand, and struggled for weeks to fill orders, leaving marijuana stores with empty shelves. As a result, the vast majority of cannabis sales in the country – roughly $5bn – are made on the illegal markets, compared to $2bn in legal sales.
