You don’t need to be a marijuana expert to know that Toronto is being overtaken by medical marijuana dispensaries.
There are currently dozens of storefront dispensaries peppered throughout the city, and, with no real legislations in place, Toronto dispensaries have been operating on their own terms. Some are stricter and require customers to be referred by doctors while other dispensaries are much more relaxed and only require patients to fill out five minutes worth of paperwork.
This is what happened when we personally checked two of them out.
Illegal or not, the Toronto police don’t see them as a priority unless there are complaints — so, as of right now, the dispensaries are free to operate.
Because of these lax requirements, stoners are flocking to these, um, joints to get their fix and dispensaries are continuing to open up to meet the demand.
To get a sense of how many dispensaries are currently operating illegally in Toronto, The Big Toke — a Toronto-based consulting firm for Canadian cannabis brands — created a map that points out their exact locations.
There are now over 100 dispensaries open within the GTA and 21 more opening in the days to come. If those numbers alone don’t raise eyebrows, the folks at The Big Toke also pointed out that there are only 105 Pizza Pizza outlets in the GTA — which gives some perceptive considering there seems to be one on nearly every corner.
But it’s not just small business owners who are taking note of how quickly this industry is sparking up. Just last week at a Loblaws shareholders’ meeting, Galen G. Weston – the head of Canada’s largest grocery and pharmacy chain – revealed he wanted to dip his toes in the marijuana pool and join in on the action.
“We’re an industry that is extremely effective at managing controlled substances,” said Weston following the company’s annual general meeting last Thursday. “It gives pharmacists the opportunity to work directly in real time with patients as opposed to doing it through the mail, working on their doses and making sure it actually has the therapeutic effect that it is intended to have.”
We’re unsure of where the future of marijuana in Canada is headed but considering Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government was elected with a promise to legalize marijuana we expect this budding culture to become a full-time grow-op.
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