When Canopy Growth started their first cannabis factory that was built in an old chocolate plant near Ottawa four years ago, it did so by predicting a promising tomorrow. Canada had already legalized medical marijuana, and Canopy made a prediction about full legalization for recreational use to be next.
What the company was not able to foresee, nonetheless, was the immediate outpouring of foreign visitors. Lawmakers and police authorities from Jamaica, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Greece, and Australia have all come beating on the door, as well as doctors from New Zealand, Brazil and Chile, along with groups of corporate investors and bankers – so many that Canopy now sometimes breaks up the groups according to their day of birthday.
“We knew we’d have to give a lot of tours, so we just cut a window into the wall,” said the company spokesman, Jordan Sinclair. “We put windows in all of the doors.”
Canada will be thrust even more directly under the international microscope on today’s voting, when a vote in the Senate is expected to ratify Bill C-45, effectively making Canada the first G20 nation to legalize recreational marijuana.
“It’s going to be a bit of a science fiction experience for a while,” said Benedikt Fischer, an expert on substance use at Toronto’s biggest psychiatric hospital. “It’s unique in the world, because it’s happening for the first time in a wealthy country. It’s not like in the US, where there are these state experiments. Most people kind of ignore Uruguay. And so the world is really looking at this.”
Governments, researchers and business leaders around the globe all have their own motives for keeping tabs. Legalization could affect Canada’s crime patterns, health and countless other factors – but exactly how, no one yet knows.
Each Canadian province intends to roll out its newly legalized market in a slightly different way, creating about a dozen mini-laboratories within one massive test case.
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