Marijuana

Canadians who invested in cannabis companies have lost more than $131 billion, according to data collected by law firm Miller Thomson, which calculated the total losses of 183 publicly traded and licenced cannabis producers.

It’s a staggering number that if broken down per capita would equate to each Canadian citizen losing about $43,000.

Larry Ellis, a lawyer with the firm, points out to CTV National News that he “doesn’t know of many Canadian investors who can afford to lose $40,000 individually.”

I see a potential class action lawsuit as legit operators were forced to close when they could not compete with illegal storefront operations that the gov has not acted against.

Adult-use cannabis sales in Canada are in the weeds.

A report from the firm Ernst and Young, commissioned by the Cannabis Council of Canada, found licensed producers in Ontario saw their share of sales revenue fall to 60.8% in April 2022 from 74.2% in July 2019.

I don’t partake so have no idea about the quality or price offered by either side. Something says the street will win however.

Meg and Scott knew something was going on with their son Kyle when, during the pandemic, he began refusing to get out of bed to attend class online.

Up until then, Kyle had been like a dream son: tall, good-looking, strong, athletic, with a great sense of humor. He was such a good baseball player that talent scouts were checking him out, and had a decent chance of someday playing in the Major League.

“He had the world by the balls,” his dad said. (At the family’s request, The Post has used pseudonyms.)

With the midterms bearing down and the post-George Floyd crime wave still underway, President Biden and his fellow Democrats face a dilemma: Continue hammering the theme that law enforcement is racist or position themselves as guardians of law and order?

Innate inclination won out again last week. Biden announced that he was pardoning all individuals who have ever been federally convicted of marijuana possession. His reason for doing so, Biden said, was to “right” the racial “wrongs” that the criminal justice system has allegedly perpetrated. “While white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people are arrested, prosecuted and convicted at disproportionately higher rates,” Biden said in a video.

While Canada marks four years of legal cannabis on Monday, industry observers are wondering why it’s taken so long for a legal, government-regulated weed marketplace to overtake the illicit market.

During the 2015 federal election campaign, cannabis legalization for the Trudeau Liberals was framed as a means to protect young people from an entrenched and dangerous criminal black market.

Monday marks the fourth anniversary of the Canadian federal government’s legalization and regulation of cannabis for adults of legal age.

It was back on Oct. 17, 2018, when the production, distribution, sale, import and export, and possession of cannabis became legal in this country, a first for a G7 nation. A year later, cannabis edible products and concentrates became legal for sale as well.

I wonder if their estimates of the size of the illicit market are optimistic.

Illegal weed still outsells legal weed — and legitimate cannabis companies are struggling

Once cannabis legalization started being taken seriously a decade ago, the majority of liberal Americans supported it. It just seemed like common sense. No longer would pot users have to rely on street dealers, so criminal organizations would wither away. At the same time, states would benefit from billions in tax revenue. Booze, after all, was once held under the thumb of prohibition in the US, bringing about thirteen years of black market activity and gang violence, which all ended when prohibition was repealed in 1933. The alcohol trade is now one of the leading earners in America and contributes roughly $260 billion to the economy. Why would marijuana be any different?

The province of Ontario made more than a half a billion dollars from the cannabis industry in the last fiscal year, according to public accounts released by the government on Friday.

But that $520 million is coming at least partially at the expense of struggling local retailers, according to Michael Armstrong, a business professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont.

“About 56 cents of every dollar you spend at a cannabis store goes to the businesses, the retailers and producers,” Armstrong told CBC Toronto.

Big Pharma and Big Tobacco are helping market high-potency, psychosis-inducing THC products as your mother’s ‘medical marijuana’

For 30 years, Dr. Libby Stuyt, a recently retired addiction psychiatrist in Pueblo, Colorado, treated patients with severe drug dependency. Typically, that meant alcohol, heroin, and methamphetamines. But about five years ago, she began to see something new.

“I started seeing people with the worst psychosis symptoms that I have ever seen,” she told me. “And the worst delusions I have ever seen.”

These cases were even more acute than what she’d seen from psychotic patients on meth. Some of the delusions were accompanied by “severe violence.” But these patients were coming up positive only for cannabis.

Since applying for her cannabis retail licence, Sasha Soeterik had been biding her time, operating a coffee and gelato shop in Toronto’s trendy Trinity Bellwoods neighbourhood while she waited for her application to go through.

The province had been ramping up approvals ever since it scrapped the controversial lottery system it initially used to give out cannabis retail licences, replacing it with an open licensing model.

Near to me is the Queensway, its been overrun by pot shops.

Legalization of recreational cannabis has seen usage rise by 20 percent, according to new research on America’s rapid and risky experiment with a drug that can be damaging — and even deadly — for young people.

University of Minnesota researchers say the frequency of pot use in California, Colorado, Oregon and other states that legalized adult recreational use jumped by a fifth, prompting ‘complex questions’ for policymakers.

The research counters other studies that recorded no increased use, and pro-cannabis campaigners who argued legalization would not boost consumption as black market pot was always widely available.

Cannabis products with exceptionally high concentrations of THC have been associated with increased instances of depression, anxiety, and dependence.

Marijuana is the third-most commonly used drug globally, after alcohol and nicotine. Its potency, measured by the concentration of THC, has steadily increased over the past few decades, raising the risk of users experiencing psychosis and addiction, according to an analysis published in the Lancet last week that was conducted by a team of mental health experts at the University of Bath’s Department of Psychology in the United Kingdom. The psychologists analyzed the association between the types of marijuana people use and addiction and mental health issues, drawing on 20 studies involving nearly 120,000 people.

As Congress considers legalizing marijuana on the national level, some Republicans have raised concerns about the impact such a move would have on the country’s rising crime rate.

“In short, this bill would be an enormous gift to the cartels and gangs, and in the midst of a nationwide violent crime surge,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said last week at a hearing about Senate cannabis legislation.

Cotton is not the only GOP lawmaker to sound the alarm over reforming the rules around marijuana. In fact, the debate over legalization has raged for decades and, despite years of data from the states that have allowed the drug, produced little in the way of consensus.