Doing a victory lap on pot legalization
WE FIND OURSELVES IN THE VANGUARD OF THE WORLD. — COLBY COSH
On Thursday the marijuana company Sundial Growers held a ribbon-cutting for its new grow-op in the Alberta town of Olds. I am not sure whether “grow-op” is an acceptable word in the new setting of giant legal cannabis cultivation facilities, but let’s stick with it, if only to call attention to the extraordinariness of what we are witnessing this month in Canada. The launch was held in a small office, and Sundial only received its cultivation licence from Health Canada on Sept. 14, but the first fruits of its pot business are already budding in a room nearby.
The company intends to have a 500,000-squarefoot growing facility built in 2019, but their press release points out that they can add more space quickly. I might have been stopped short by the spectacle of the mayor and the (United Conservative) MLA rejoicing as a CEO explained the details of his craft weed business and remarked on plans for a “Sweet Jesus” varietal. But what really struck me is something the mayor said: when the company is up and fully running, he observed, it is going to hire 500 people in Olds, becoming the town’s largest single employer. Olds is, of course, home to Olds College, a century-old agriculture and food research institute: this is a major reason for the new marijuana industry to locate there.
How long ago would this scene — being played, as it is, in a naturally conservative part of the Alberta hinterland — have seemed like science fiction or parody? The Sundial facility is dwarfed by the 800,000-square-foot Aurora Sky factory, strategically located near Edmonton’s awkwardly remote international airport in the suburb of Nisku. Everyone who has ever tried to flee Edmonton or come to it through that airport has complained about its preposterous distance from the capital’s downtown, but this turns out to have an unimagined advantage. You can build a spacious agri-pharmaceutical facility at low cost practically next to the runway, establish an ultra-secure, ultra-short supply chain, and presto hempo: overnight response to a worldwide medical market for cannabis products becomes a snap.
I am someone who is entitled to a victory lap for having insisted years ago that we were not, as a country, properly imagining the dimensions of a legally unleashed cannabis industry. We had no idea how much economic activity was being annihilated by a perverse, illogical feature of criminal law. Maybe it is time, as Finally Doing The Obvious Thing Day nears, for me to take that victory lap.
What I feel instead is that my own imagination was somewhat feeble. How many older folks do you know who are already rubbing cannabidiol oil on arthritic joints? How many people are experimenting with edibles? I have a conversation with cannabis somewhere in it at least once a day now.
And, by some miracle, we find ourselves in the vanguard of the world. One of the amusing features of the cannabis boom is the very visible involvement of MITACS, the federally funded research establishment that connects PhDs with those businesses that can use some. The “M” in “MITACS” originally stood for “Mathematics”, as in “Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems.” It was founded in 1999 to fill a sort of gap in the national research funding system: math and closely associated disciplines like computing science were not well covered by the established envelopes of SSHRC, NSERC or the National Research Council, and top Canadian-trained scholars were being lost.
Over time, even as the footprint of computing, statistics and machine learning inside other fields has grown, MITACS has suppressed the mathematical origins of its name — I suppose it should be spelled “Mitacs” — and its cash is now “open to all disciplines.” A lot of it, at the moment, is going toward marijuana producers with a scientific angle. Aurora is working with Mitacs on a huge study of health outcomes for medical cannabis users. Mitacs and Sundial are gene-mapping cannabis cultivars with the University of Lethbridge. Fashionable Tilray Inc. has a Mitacs-supported study of vaping and post-traumatic stress disorder underway. It seems difficult to find an ambitious early cannabiz player that isn’t getting help from the agency.
From one point of view, Mitacs’s mission creep is a little horrifying — but from another, we were lucky to have something of the kind in place for the Marijuana Manhattan Project. Canada will benefit from having a firstmover advantage in cannabis legalization in many ways, but scientific knowledge is a huge and obvious one. Giving scientists gentle incentives to join this land rush is probably not a bad thing, because this is all work that deserves doing: figuring out how cannabis DNA leads to chemical characteristics, looking into the medical applications for cannabis that people are already inventing and using on the fly.
There is no reason it should not be done here by Canadians, along with the growing in places like Olds and Nisku. I have been telling people that Edmonton, with its convenient/annoying airport and the plentiful arable land around it, will have a skyscraper with a cannabis brand on its side one day. It now just seems ludicrous to say “one day,” as if it were a distant future I will not live to see: I am, indeed, wondering if it will require a whole decade.
HOW LONG AGO WOULD THIS SCENE ... HAVE SEEMED LIKE SCIENCE FICTION OR PARODY?