A person lights up a joint during an event at Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto on Oct. 17, 2018, when the Cannabis Act first came into effect.FRED LUM/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Ben Kaplan is the author of Catch a Fire: The Blaze and Bust of the Canadian Cannabis Industry.
I liked my neighbours well enough before 2020. But when they started making edibles during the pandemic, I started seeing them every week.
We became close. Not close in the sense that I’d babysit their kids or ask to borrow money, but in the sense that every time I saw them, they brought joy. Their products were reasonably priced and mellow, and while their hours weren’t perfect – they were also stuck at home managing children between Zoom calls – their peaceful, positive homemade cannabis vibes were exactly what I was shopping for. It was a connection that went beyond getting blitzed.
Those kinds of connections are hard to find these days.
On Oct. 17, 2018, when Canada became the first G8 country to legalize marijuana, it was the birth of an industry – and the death of a culture. Make no mistake, the legalization of cannabis was a wonderful and just correction of a racist, racially policed and bad law. But something was lost when The Man started dealing dope: that unspoken social exchange of culture, language and ideology that I’ve appreciated ever since I was 15, and goes far deeper than commerce. The heart of the heritage is that cannabis is supposed to represent connection – and legalization lost the pot plot.
Weed was anti-authoritarian and cherished by an underground community that abhors advertising, capitalism, power and greed. In fact, that community formed in opposition to U.S. president Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, in opposition of the squares, shysters and Big Business – exactly the forces that ushered in legal weed. We like to get the giggles, the munchies and spend time in the dark feeling introspective and tender. They’re not like us.
Cannabis Day 1: How Canada greeted legalization from coast to coast
I never thought I’d see pot legalized in my lifetime, and it’s hard to complain when there’s as many different pot drinks as there are Slurpee confections at 7-11. Plus, plenty of non-cannabis people I know have had their dispositions improved by edibles that you can now get almost anywhere, cheaply. But being a long-time weed smoker in the wake of Oct. 17, 2018, is like being a Taylor Swift fan amid the Eras tour: as if a community that felt like it was just for you was hijacked by Johnny-come-latelies.
Legalization, bless it, killed the thrill, the fun, the misadventure, the discovery and the subterfuge that comes with pot – a trail of smoke I can trace from my friends in high school to my university love to the new dads from daycare I’d run into before 2018 at the illegal dispensary on our block. It made you feel like you were a part of something. Choosing liquor is easy; the smoking section is always away from the crowd.
By having cashiers hand weed over a counter, legalization killed the secret codes, the risk, the outsider point of view often held by the people who smoked it. “Young ‘un, wanna go for a stroll?” were the first words my best friend said to me at the summer camp where we worked, and I said yes – and he knew, by the way I wore my hat, that I knew what that meant. There was trust involved in copping dime bags, and a feeling of acceptance in being seen as someone who could, as someone who was vouched for – a litmus test, if you will.
Colourful packaging is used for an in-store display at a medical cannabis dispensary in Florida.Rebecca Blackwell/The Associated Press
Buying weed from the government takes the intimacy out of this delicate dance. Last spring, I went on a date with a woman who had no problem sharing martinis with me, but drew the line at us smoking a joint together, even though she was a pothead. She wasn’t ready to get that close yet. It was a reminder that pot’s about letting your guard down, not a transaction. It’s a sensibility – a value exchange. You either have it, or you don’t.
The cannabis company executives who made weed as widely available as Starbucks coffee often pride themselves on not having that sensibility – on not using their own products. Former police officers who rushed into the industry – including former Toronto police chief and Conservative MP Julian Fantino, who once decreed legal pot akin to legalizing murder – had no compassion for the culture and no love for the plant. So of course many of them would make pot available at boutiques that looked like Apple stores and make shopping for ounces algorithmic and soulless. This is how they imagined people like them would purchase marijuana.
They ignored the people like us who have never bought pot that way. And even after legalization, when the science journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence found that two-thirds of all Canadian pot was consumed by just 10 per cent of users – these are the weed smokers, not the Chardonnay moms who might dabble – it’s noteworthy that the illicit industry still thrives. Pot didn’t need gussying up. Our product worked fine as it was.
Alan Young, the great legal mind who first helped get medical and then recreational cannabis laws passed, died in December. But he never championed legal weed. Cronyism made him sick, and he felt that cannabis corporations, many of whom consulted with him but never offered him a job, were beyond contempt. For him, weed smokers were countercultural outlaws like himself who prided themselves on being outside of Bay Street’s crass drinking-and-hard-drug culture and who cared about the environment and human rights. After all, to grow cannabis – a flower – takes nurturing. Who wants to buy grass from a conglomerate?
And hating on legalization is more than a matter of taste; it’s a matter of justice. According to University of Toronto sociologist Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, Black and Indigenous people in Canada were up to seven times more likely to get arrested for cannabis charges than white Canadians, even though consumption among Black and white people is roughly the same, if the U.S. Census is anything to go by. Yet when marijuana was illegal, police targeted minorities in disadvantaged communities, destroying families; the audacity of having rich, connected white men open legal pot stores in many of these same areas only underscores the industry’s tin ear. It’s obscene to sell people something they were once arrested for – but now, with profits going to public companies funded in part by Big Tobacco, the rules have somehow changed. Playing reggae in these shops doesn’t make it better; it actually makes it worse.
Legalization made pot uncool by diminishing the connections that it naturally created. I remember, for instance, the one time I smoked weed with a celebrity. I was in New York, waiting to interview Snoop Dogg, and when he arrived seven hours late, he didn’t apologize – instead (and this was before legalization), he reached into his shoebox and rolled up a blunt. We carried on our conversation and, after he took about 12 hits, Snoop passed it to me. I’ll never forget the grin on his face. He wasn’t promoting his cannabis line, like he’d be doing today: He was trusting me – inviting me into his circle.
You had to get to know someone to get weed. And corporations making pot more expensive (there are bongs that cost $13,000), stronger (with ridiculous percentages of THC), sneakier (including through vapes) or gluten-free (through edibles) are only reinforcing what’s wrong with legal weed’s value proposition. No wonder Canadians lost more than $131-billion investing in cannabis companies: the industry valued the forest more than the trees.
Scale isn’t always a good thing, and pot is meant to be small and contraband. The high lasts a while; it’s cheap, scarce and shared. But the first legal pot stores were designed for tourists, who could get consultations with budtenders armed with iPads offering options among indica and sativa – categorizations popularized by the industry that most weed smokers didn’t know, want or need.
Legalization took the magic out of marijuana, the kind of magic that leads you to discover someone you liked, maybe loved – sometimes right next door. Today’s stores have streamlined the journey, failing to understand that if you could get weed – if you scored – that was the journey. Now, weed has arrived at its unnatural destination: in the pocket of big business. Harsh.