How has edible pot culture shifted years after becoming legal?
Shirs (he/they) // Contributor
Alex Baidanuta (she/her) // Illustrator
From getting absolutely ‘zooted’ from a homemade brownie that your friend’s weird uncle made, to purchasing flavored dab-pens, weed infused cookies and canned weed drinks in government-owned dispensaries, Canadians have experienced a massive shift in weed culture since 2018, when Canada became the second country to legalize weed. That being said, Canadians may have been tolerant of cannabis consumption, with about 43 per cent of the population being supportive of legalization in 2016, according to the Impressions of Canadians on Legalization of Marijuana survey done by Nanos in 2017 as published by CTV News. In 1981, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau came close to legalizing weed. It’s maybe because of the pre-existing—and thriving—stoner culture that Canada has always had, we have come to see a thriving market of extravagant weed products.
Before you could walk into a legal dispensary in Canada, people were acquiring weed how they have always gotten weed, or other drugs all over the world: plugs. There used to be massive underground operations to grow and distribute marijuana. Weed was grown in basements, hidden away in farms in northern regions away from the law and distributed locally through plugs or through gangs for a larger scale operation. It is estimated that right before the legalization in 2018, the underground market of cannabis was making about $3.8 billion in retail sales, according to 2020 Public Safety of Canada committee notes. This is all just to say, people were getting quite baked. It might have been slightly more inconvenient to get weed compared to now, but it definitely was not difficult. The public perception may have been that of acceptance, or at least tolerance. The big suppliers of marijuana mostly dealt with flower, which means people had to get creative on their own if they wanted to ingest the ‘zaza’ in ways other than smoking it.
Tea, brownies, smoothies and cookies are all found in dispensaries today. The quantity is controlled. If one decided they wanted to make some brownies, they could find plenty of videos, recipes and information online that have been tried and trusted (with recommended strains!) and they could make it themselves with the legal weed purchased from BC Cannabis.
How would people know how to bake brownies back in the day? Forget different buds; even the options between indica and sativa were foreign to the regular consumer before legalization. You got what you were given, with no precise THC percentages, no variety between strains: just weed. How did people measure quantities for their home-cooked recipes? Short answer: they didn’t. It was just trial and error. Even if you were using a recipe, you couldn’t tell if the weed you had in hand matched the same potency. Hearing horror stories of consuming one too many brownies—thinking they weren’t effective—was a common theme. A lot of recipes were handed down from friends or cousins, and finding information online about weed products was not as reliable, if it was even available. There were people that would create relatively big batches of edibles to sell but that was still not possible to do on a larger scale.
The legalization of weed in Canada has massively affected the illegal billion-dollar market of marijuana. The Canadian Government making more than $5.4 billion in cannabis tax revenue since 2018 shows how much of this culture is growing. Now, almost 59 per cent of adults living in B.C. have tried marijuana at least once according to a survey done by the BC government. This has given rise to many legitimate businesses centered around pot. From weed-themed restaurants to online home delivery, the market has expanded significantly since 2018.
How has this impacted the cannabis culture? The homemade edibles culture remains alive and thriving. If anything, legalization has granted access to more people that are willing to make edibles at home. Whilst people may have learned the art of making edibles out of necessity, it is now approached with further interest and passion. People learn it despite having easy access to premade gummies or edibles. It’s like how people didn’t stop making cakes at home just because cake shops are around. Recipes have evolved, which signifies that the culture has evolved. To ask if this means the culture has lost its charm would be a more profound question. The price of pot has decreased after legalization according to a study done as part of the International Cannabis Policy Study, because it got snatched away from the highly monopolized black market by the regulated government licensed market. However, the unregulated, still-illegal market also thrived alongside legal dispensaries. Once the market somewhat stabilized the price of cannabis, the black market flourished by providing more potent, higher quantities which resulted in a lower price.
Home-cooked treats from around the corner before legalization may or may not have lost their charm, but they certainly have gained a larger market, and a whole bunch of new fans.