Windsor far removed from nearest cannabis retail stores

Postmedia News - thegrowthop.com Posted 5 years ago
image

Six months after Ottawa legalized the drug for recreational purposes, the first batch of cannabis retail stores in Ontario is set to open on April 1.

But for Windsor marijuana consumers wanting to access a legal bricks-and-mortar outlet, it will be a four-hour round trip drive to London.

And with only 25 stores set to serve Canada’s biggest province, one local pot activist said the biggest winner of Ontario’s modest start to a new industry will be the black market.

“They’re thanking Doug Ford right now,” said Jon Liedtke, co-host of the Cannabis Act podcast. “This has been the biggest boon to business that they could have seen.”

For now, the province has allocated seven stores to the Ontario West region, encompassing an area that includes Hamilton, London, Niagara and Windsor. Following a lottery by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, the successful applicants selected three sites in London, and two stores each in Hamilton and the Niagara area.

“It’s disappointing, absolutely disappointing,” said Liedtke, the former co-owner of the Higher Limits cannabis lounge in downtown Windsor. “I would have hoped that someone who had received one of the lottery licences would have seen the benefits of opening up down here in Windsor-Essex.”

Supplying the legal market with legal product has remained a big challenge since legalization began last October. When Windsor and other municipalities that were left out might get their own retail stores remains unknown.

“We are continuing to monitor the national supply shortage and will make further information available to potential applicants for future retail stores as soon as we can,” said Brian Gray, a spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

The government suggests those in communities without access to the new retail outlets continue to use the online Ontario Cannabis Store.

In an email to the Star, Gray said that “transparency and equality were the core principles of the lottery approach.”

Those who were selected Jan. 11 after entering the AGCO’s “expression of interest lottery” simply had to indicate in which region they hoped to operate, without specifying a municipality. Any community was available, as long as the chosen city had a population of more than 50,000 and its municipal council had “opted-in” to cannabis retail stores, according to AGCO spokesperson Raymond Kahnert.

It was over concerns about ongoing supply issues that the Ford government chose to limit the initial rollout to 25 outlets.

“Taking into consideration the required investments by a prospective private legal retailer, the government could not in good conscience issue an unlimited number of store authorizations to businesses in the face of such shortages and uncertainty in future supply,” Gray said. “Private retailers need certainty that there will be a reliable supply of cannabis to support their business and combat the illegal market.”

Gray said that “selling outside of Ontario’s authorized retail system will also remain illegal under federal law.”

Liedtke predicts that’s unlikely to influence the illicit market.

“People are getting product, and the province had one job — make it easy for people to access cannabis,” he said. “They decided not to.”

Local police departments will continue to play a “game of whack-a-mole” as illegal dispensaries are shut down and others open up. But most black market outlets, he adds, aren’t brick-and-motor stores but delivery services.

“It’s not surprising that this is where we’re at right now, with only 25 available throughout the entire province and with as many that were allocated directly to the city of Toronto itself and the GTA area,” said Liedtke.

He called Ontario’s lottery “a grab bag for everyone to try and get in and win that golden ticket,” but that it should have allowed for a better distribution based on geography and population.

Related

  • Despite council support, slim odds Windsor gets a pot store in 2019
  • Scoring illegal pot is easy as Windsor experiences black market boom

Liedtke points to how private retail stores in Alberta were rolled out, with more than 100 opened within a month of weed being made legal.

“They don’t have the same issues that we’re seeing here, which is going to be large pockets of the population that will be unable to be serviced,” he said.

That said, Alberta had to temporarily stop issuing licences because it did not have enough supply from the licensed producers to meet consumer demand.

[email protected]