The first legal recreational cannabis has officially been sold in Canada!
After Uruguay, Canada has become the second country to legalize possession and use of recreational cannabis. Canadian provinces and municipalities have been preparing for months for the end of cannabis prohibition.
What’s allowed?
Canada’s Cannabis Act allows people 18 and older to buy cannabis online or in retail stores. Most provinces have raised the minimum age to 19, however, to align with the drinking age.
Canadian law sets a 30-gram limit (just over an ounce) on how much people can buy at once or possess in public. However, there’s no limit on how much Canadians can possess in their homes.
The Canadian law also allows its residents to grow up to four plants at home, though two provinces — Quebec and Manitoba — opted to forbid home-growing. U.S. states including California, Nevada, Alaska and Colorado allow home-growing of up to six plants.
Unlike America, where there many types of products are available, Canada is for now allowing sales of only cannabis flower, tinctures, capsules and seeds. Edibles and concentrates are expected to be available in about a year.
The nationwide market for cannabis opened today at midnight. Preparations included mailings to 15’000’000 households detailing the new cannabis laws and public awareness campaigns.
As always, there remain some concerns, especially about the readiness for police forces to tackle drug-impaired driving. Provinces and territories are responsible for setting out most of the details for where cannabis can be bought and consumed within their jurisdictions. This has created a patchwork of legislation across the country as jurisdictions choose more or less restrictive frameworks for selling and using cannabis. We already published an article about the legal situation yesterday, you can read it here.
We expect an insane cannabis hype in Canada. We already saw pictures of long lines of people who wanted to get into cannabis dispensaries at midnight. Some retailer already said they expect to be sold out by the end of the week. We will certainly keep you up to that as everything progresses but today it’s time to celebrate because it’s such a huge day for all of us 🙂
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