The Canadian Cannabis Industry is a Cesspit
Six years inside Canada's legal cannabis industry. Here's what I've learned.
I am old enough to remember what it was like before any of this existed.
Back in the UK, as a teenager, getting cannabis was an adventure - to say the least. You would set off on some circuitous social journey through a chain of acquaintances, never quite sure where it would end, how long it would take, or what you would come back with. Whatever you found, you had no idea what it actually was - you were just happy to have found it. No strain name, no THC percentage, no certificate of analysis. Just something wrapped in foil that a friend of a friend had sourced from somewhere unspecified, and which you would carry home with the careful reverence of someone transporting a rare and slightly illegal artifact. Which, of course, you were.
Then you and your friends would pile into someone’s bedroom, roll badly, argue about the right way to do it, and spend the next several hours in a state of profound hilarity over things that were not, objectively, that funny. There was something genuinely joyful about it. Chaotic and unregulated and completely outside the law, yes. But joyful. The plant meant something. It brought people together. It had magic.
Years went by, as they do. Over the years I slowly developed an understanding of cannabis as a spiritual, medical and revolutionary tool. I moved to Canada. Cannabis was legalized. I thought: this is the moment. A plant that had been so heavily suppressed, criminalized, and stigmatized for a century was finally being brought into the light. The potential was extraordinary. The science of the endocannabinoid system was waiting to be explored and communicated. The agricultural and industrial possibilities of hemp were enormous. There was an opportunity to build something here that would serve humanity, in a way that we desperately need.
So I started working in the industry.
I have spent the better part of a decade in this space: from repping craft brands to working in a government-owned retail store, but mostly running an education and grading business trying to inject some nuance and empowering knowledge into the industry - for my sins. I have slowly watched something with genuine potential get methodically degraded. What follows is equal parts industry insider account and cathartic personal therapy session.
How We Got Here
A brief history, for context, because it matters to everything that follows.
Cannabis appeared in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia from 1850 and sat on pharmacy shelves alongside aspirin until the politics changed. By 1942 it had been removed entirely, with the medical establishment declaring it had no medicinal value. The American Medical Association’s own representative had testified against its removal, warning it would deprive Americans of a drug of genuine therapeutic worth. He was ignored. Canada criminalized cannabis in 1923, in circumstances historians still find murky.
What filled the vacuum was the pharmaceutical industry, which stepped in with patentable synthetic alternatives for pain, anxiety, and sleep. The opioid era did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a system deliberately cleared of cheaper, less patentable competition. Those connections are not speculative: Purdue Pharma and Abbott Laboratories were among the largest donors to groups that actively fought legalization for years. Insys Therapeutics, a fentanyl manufacturer, contributed $500,000 to defeat Arizona’s 2016 legalization measure while simultaneously developing its own synthetic THC product. Insys executives were later convicted of racketeering related to their opioid marketing. The irony is almost poetic, except for the bodies and broken families.
We know how that went. The opioid crisis was not an accident. It was the downstream consequence of keeping a natural, non-patentable plant out of the pharmacy while the patent-holders sold us something far more dangerous in its place. Hold onto that, because it becomes relevant again shortly.
Legalization’s Broken Promise
Canada legalized cannabis in October 2018 with a stated mandate: increase safety, reduce addiction, cut off youth access, eliminate the black market. My first close look at what that actually meant in practice came in 2019, working with BC Cannabis Stores, the government-run retail operation that holds the unique distinction of being both the exclusive wholesale distributor for cannabis in British Columbia and a direct competitor to the private retail stores it supplies. The government positioned itself as gatekeeper, landlord, and rival simultaneously. Classic Canada. They leaned on me for cannabis knowledge, operations, customer service expertise. For a while, I thought there might be a career there. Then I watched what they actually prioritized. Cannabis, for the people running that operation, was not about cannabis. It was not about the plant, its history, its potential, or the people who used it. It was about risk mitigation and revenue extraction.
Seven years on, the evidence against each of legalization’s stated goals is sitting in plain sight in Health Canada’s own data. This is important because the government is still collecting the tax and still claiming credit for a public health framework that the data does not support.
The numbers tell a story the government has not been eager to amplify. A McMaster University study published in February 2026, drawing on Statistics Canada survey data from nearly 35,000 Canadians over a decade, found that weekly cannabis use more than doubled between 2012 and 2022, with anxiety and depression diagnoses rising in parallel. By 2022, regular users were five times more likely to report depression, anxiety, or suicidality than non-users. Suicidality among youth climbed 44% over the same period.
A critic might argue that most of that data predates legalization. Fair enough. So look specifically at what happened after October 2018. A 2023 study published in JAMA Network Open, analyzing 26.9 million individuals across Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia, found something instructive in the post-legalization data. During the early period of legalization, when product selection was limited and stores were few, hospitalization rates actually held steady or declined slightly. Then commercialization kicked in. More stores, more products, higher potency options widely available. And cannabis hospitalizations rose sharply, with cannabis-induced psychosis showing the largest relative increase. The study recorded over 105,000 cannabis-related hospitalizations across those four provinces in the seven years spanning 2015 to 2021, with one-third among people aged 15 to 24.
In other words, the harm did not come from legalization itself. It came from commercialization. From the expansion of the market the government designed and profits from.
The regulatory structure that produced these outcomes is not hard to understand. Producers operate under crushing compliance costs and a tax regime that eats margin at every level. The rational commercial response, in that environment, is to optimize for the product with the highest potency, the longest shelf life, the best margin, the most efficient delivery mechanism, and the most reliable repeat customer. That product is not a low-THC flower suited to a curious occasional user who wants to unwind on a Friday evening. It is a high-potency vape cartridge or infused pre-roll filled with distillate and synthetic botanical terpenes, designed to deliver the maximum effect as efficiently as possible. The government created that incentive structure. The industry responded accordingly. And then the government collects the tax - lots of it.
There is essentially no investment in what I would consider the actual promise of cannabis: deep, honest consumer education, harm reduction that goes beyond a sticker on a package and some surface-level ‘educational’ blog posts. None of that is incentivized. All of it loses to margin pressure. The lowest common denominator is not a failure of the industry’s imagination. It is the logical output of the system that was designed.
The thing that makes this particularly maddening is that there is a better framework sitting right underneath us, almost entirely ignored. The endocannabinoid system (ECS), the network of receptors and signalling molecules that regulates mood, pain, sleep, appetite, immune function, and more, is one of the most significant physiological discoveries of the last century. It was only identified in the late 1980s, which means it received essentially no attention during the decades when cannabis was being prohibited and demonized, and it has received remarkably little attention since. Tragically, after decades of so-called ‘medical cannabis’ most Canadian physicians cannot tell you what the endocannabinoid system does, let alone how different cannabis products interact with it. This is not a minor gap. It is a foundational failure of medical education with direct consequences for the health and wellbeing of Canadians.
Here is what makes that failure particularly frustrating: a healthy body produces its own endocannabinoids. You do not necessarily need the plant at all. Regular exercise, quality sleep, a whole-foods diet, meditation, time in nature, these have all been scientifically shown to stimulate the ECS. This is knowledge that could meaningfully reduce pharmaceutical dependency and improve how people manage their own health, and it costs nothing to communicate. But it requires a healthcare system that considers it worth knowing, and a cannabis industry with the integrity to tell people they might not need as much product as they think. Neither condition currently exists.
Because if you actually understood the endocannabinoid system, and how different compounds in cannabis interact with it, the THC-first product landscape would look not just commercially cynical but medically backwards. Many people who are using high-potency vape cartridges to manage anxiety or sleep or chronic pain would likely do better with lower-THC, higher-terpene, whole-plant products that work with the endocannabinoid system rather than overwhelming it. The research on this is not conclusive, but it is substantial enough to warrant serious attention and honest consumer guidance. Instead, those products are scarce, because there is no commercial incentive to produce them, and no regulatory framework that rewards nuance over potency.
Medical cannabis in Canada has effectively ceased to exist as a meaningful clinical option. Doctors do not learn about the endocannabinoid system in medical school. Many are understandably still reluctant to authorize cannabis use and are not equipped to guide patients through it if they do. So what fills that gap? In practice, most Canadians will have medical conversations about cannabis with a budtender who is undertrained, almost certainly underpaid, and doing their best under a retail model that was never designed to deliver healthcare outcomes. That is a raw deal for the budtender and a worse one for the patient.
The gap between what cannabis could be within a properly informed healthcare system and what it currently is inside a government retail structure optimized for tax revenue is not a small one. It is the distance between a plant that could help people understand and support their own physiology and a commodity being sold by THC percentage as the only meaningful metric.
The People Problem
I want to be careful here, because there are genuinely excellent people in this industry. I have met some of them, and I will say more about that at the end. But there is also a cultural dynamic in cannabis that deserves to be named, because it is real and it is doing damage.
A significant portion of the people drawn to this industry came to it because the plant helped them through something. That is not a criticism. Cannabis has a long and legitimate history as a tool for managing pain, anxiety, trauma, and the general difficulty of being alive. The problem is that for some, the something they came through is still ongoing, and the plant is still managing it rather than resolving it. That distinction matters. Self-medication with cannabis, like self-medication with anything, tends to produce a degree of defensiveness about the substance being used and the reasons for using it.
Layer onto that the particular ideological climate that has settled over much of the Canadian cannabis space. There is a pronounced culture of performative progressivism, loud in its commitments to inclusion and safety, ruthless in practice toward anyone who steps outside an invisible but aggressively enforced set of acceptable positions. I have seen it directed at others. I have experienced it myself. Disagree with the prevailing ideology, question a narrative, refuse to perform the expected rituals of solidarity, and the response is not debate. It is a coordinated effort to damage your reputation and your livelihood. From people who will tell you, with apparent conviction, that they believe in community and care.
Let me be precise about this, because the word gets used loosely: there is nothing inclusive about these people. Not in practice. The defining feature of their behaviour is exclusion. Exclusion of dissenting views, exclusion of inconvenient questions, exclusion of people who decline to perform the correct affiliations on demand. They think of themselves as inclusive. That self-image is sincerely held, which makes it more troubling, not less.
What makes it particularly corrosive is that the cancellation rarely requires a direct confrontation. It does not even require that they actually know you or your position with any accuracy. Someone hears something second-hand, applies an ideological template they are emotionally attached to, and makes a decision about your character and your right to participate. No conversation. No chance to clarify. Just the quiet removal, the reputation whispering, the doors that stop opening. I have watched it happen to people in this industry multiple times. I have experienced versions of it myself. And I will say plainly that this problem is not unique to cannabis. It is a feature of a particular cultural moment that has settled across many industries and institutions. Cannabis just has it in concentrated form, perhaps because the people who ended up here were already, in some cases, running from something.
It is also exhausting in a specific way that I suspect many people in this industry will recognize. Not the dramatic confrontations, which at least have the clarity of open conflict. The exhaustion comes from the ambient performance of it: the constant virtue signalling, the ideological litmus tests embedded in ordinary conversation, the social cost of simply being honest about what you observe. That accumulates. It is its own kind of cut.
The deepest irony is this. Cannabis people, of all people, should understand exactly how pharmaceutical and institutional interests have shaped the suppression of this plant for a century. That history is the reason this industry exists at all. And yet question those same interests in certain corners of this space, raise an eyebrow at institutional medicine’s ongoing relationship with cannabis, suggest that reflexive deference to pharmaceutical authority might not be warranted given everything we know, and the pitchforks come out. From cannabis people. The captive defending the logic of the captor. Poetically tragic does not quite cover it.
The Hemp Betrayal: Burning Bales and Clear-Cutting Forests
If you want a single metric for how thoroughly the Canadian cannabis framework has failed, look at hemp.
Canadian hemp-licensed acreage peaked at over 110,000 acres in 2017, the year before recreational legalization. By 2023, it had fallen to under 30,000 acres, the lowest level since Health Canada began tracking. Active hemp licences dropped from 1,269 in 2020 to 624 in 2024. Calgary-based hemp processor Hempalta, one of the country’s larger operations, shut down its processing entirely in September 2025. The CEO described it plainly: “It’s certainly been a battle for the industry.”
The reasons are not mysterious. Hemp still falls under the Cannabis Act, burdened with the same licensing requirements and THC testing regimes as high-potency recreational cannabis, even though industrial hemp contains 0.3% THC or less and poses no meaningful intoxication risk. Industry organizations spent six years fighting to have hemp meal approved as animal feed, an application that was only formally submitted in summer 2024. For context, canola crushers rely on feed markets to make their economics work. Denying hemp the same pathway while it sits under pharmaceutical-grade regulation is not oversight. It is a structural impediment. Why?
The result is this: most hemp fibre produced in Canada is currently disposed of by farmers, often by burning bales in the field, because the processing infrastructure to use it does not exist and the regulatory environment does not incentivize building it. We are burning a carbon-sequestering, soil-regenerating, textile-producing, construction-grade crop in the fields of the same country that is watching its old-growth forests disappear and its manufacturing base hollow out. Hemp has been touted for hempcrete, insulation, biodegradable plastics, high-protein food products, and some of the most efficient carbon sequestration available in agriculture. It could be foundational to a more resilient Canadian economy. Instead, it is contracting every year. And yet our Government loves to spend money on propaganda ads informing Canadians about how they are investing in Canada and building Canada strong.
The government did not do this by malice, necessarily. Though I will say that I have heard unsettling off-the-record comments suggesting certain agricultural government workers have been instructed to kill, delay, or otherwise divert interest in hemp manufacturing. Malice or incompetence, the result is the same: we watch our neighbours in the United States make significant gains in hemp innovation, we watch the last of our old-growth forests get logged, we watch our mills shut down, and we watch a crop sitting right here in the ground, waiting, going nowhere.
The Sharks and the Stolen Ideas
I will keep this section short because it is the least surprising part of this story.
When an industry gets access to capital and regulatory protection, the corporate players move in. That is how markets work. What is specific to cannabis is the degree to which the space attracted people whose primary skill was identifying good ideas developed by smaller operators and implementing them at scale with the resources to make the originators irrelevant. Educational frameworks, grading methodologies, customer service models that took years to develop got absorbed into large organizations that have the legal teams and marketing budgets to potentially make them their own.
The best people I know in cannabis have left, or are leaving, or are staying out of a stubbornness they would probably admit is not entirely rational. The ones who remain often do so because the plant itself still means something to them, separate from the industry built around it. That gap, between what the plant is and what the industry has become, is really what this whole piece is about.
What Remains
Through it all, I am still here.
Partly because some stubbornness is not entirely rational, as I said. But mostly because, across eight years in an industry I have spent several thousand words describing as a cesspit, I have met people I will know for the rest of my life. People who came to cannabis with genuine curiosity, who stayed with genuine principles, who kept asking hard questions when the easier path was to perform the expected rituals and collect a paycheque. Those people exist. They are not the majority, but they exist, and they are the reason the industry has not entirely collapsed into its worst instincts.
The plant is also still the plant, and I will always be an advocate for it. Whatever the Canadian regulatory framework has done to the commercial cannabis market, it has not changed what cannabis is, what it does, or what it could become if the people working with it had the freedom and the institutional support to explore it properly. The endocannabinoid system is still one of the most important and least understood systems in human physiology. Hemp is still one of the most versatile and underused crops on earth. The history of its suppression is still a case study in how pharmaceutical and commercial interests shape public policy in ways that cost real people real health outcomes over decades.
Those stories are worth telling. They are worth working toward, even in an industry that often makes that work harder than it needs to be.
So I stay, I think. For now. With both eyes open.
And as long as there are people in this space with the courage to ask inconvenient questions, the curiosity to follow them past the point where they become uncomfortable, and the principles to report back honestly on what they find, we will probably be okay.
I think.
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Further Reading
Canada’s Hemp Industry Continues to Shrink, Cannabis Industry Data, July 2025
It’s ‘Been a Battle’ for Canada’s Hemp Industry, CBC News, December 2025
History of Drug Policy in Canada, Canadian Drug Policy Coalition
The Emperor Wears No Clothes, Jack Herer
Cannabis Pharmacy: The Practical Guide to Medical Marijuana, Michael Backes (endocannabinoid system overview)
Great article. I am a boomer and I smoke pot and love it. I have smoked it off and on most of my life. I will not buy government pot, I stick to the ones I know, I do not trust the government with anything, I would not put it past them adding shiit to the pot. The strength of pot has gone way up from the old days. I have a hard time that it can send someone to the hospital, although these are young people. The black market is still running, they maybe got rid of some but not all. Thank you
Thanks and well done. I was invited to and sat on federal and territorial discussions on the pre legalization of cannabis.
The corporate capture was one of my biggest concerns.
One area that is a bit of a gain is that you do have a better idea of what you are getting and that there is oversight of what and how much inputs are used (cides in particular). However, that could likely be done better by a 3rd party system like organic certification.