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TORONTO – You won’t find brightly coloured bongs or bubble gum-flavoured rolling papers displayed from the backdrop of exposed brick and modern, industrial-style furnishings at Tokyo Smoke.
Canada’s licensed pot producers face uncertainty after court says patients can grow their own
In a choice Wednesday, federal court judge Michael Phelan gave patients the right to grow their own marijuana, arguing the current system restricts accessibility drug
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Instead, the store – situated in an old shipping dock nestled between two warehouses in Toronto’s west end – carries high-end pot paraphernalia befitting the pages of a design magazine whilst serving up glasses of artisanal coffee.
Pipes handcrafted by California-based ceramicist Ben Medansky sit alongside a pricey portable vaporizer, a reimagined form of in france they press coffeemaker launched using a Kickstarter campaign and a selection of what shop owner Alan Gertner calls “museum quality collectibles” – items for example vintage Barbies along with a vintage Hermes bag.
It’s a part of Gertner’s mission to create a cannabis-friendly lifestyle brand that caters to the urban intellectual Body that breaks the mould of dated weed associations involving video games and junk food.
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“I don’t think there’s a home for somebody who’s buying Mast Brothers chocolate and drinking the nicest coffee to have a similar experience of pot,” says Gertner, who quit his job at Google to produce the brand.
“It’s no different from somebody who has beautiful stemware within their home for alcohol. We ritualize and love our experiences, and I think we ought to have a similar thing with cannabis.”
The emergence of a luxury cannabis-oriented lifestyle brand like Tokyo Smoke may be the latest rise in a saga that has seen the purveyors of pot try to reshape popular perceptions of the drug.
Until more recently, those efforts happen to be aimed at trying to demonstrate the drug’s medical legitimacy.
Philippe Lucas, a vice-president at Nanaimo, B.C.-based grower Tilray, says decades of propaganda – including the well-known 1936 flick “Reefer Madness” – make rebranding marijuana a frightening task.
“I believe the stigma is totally understandable whenever we consider the 70 many years of misinformation, propaganda and drug war rhetoric that’s emerge from Canada and also the U.S.,” says Lucas, who is even the executive director of the Canadian Medical Cannabis Council.
Adding to the difficulty are Health Canada regulations that prevent medical marijuana producers from making health claims in their advertising materials – rules which also affect the broader pharmaceutical industry.
Canadian cannabis producers used a variety of strategies to change perceptions about the drug, including leaving the road names typically used to identify strains.
Mettrum, Bowmanville, Ont.-based grower, utilizes a colour-coded spectrum – red to be the strongest, yellow the mildest – to recognize each product’s strength along with other characteristics.
“We created an accountable dialogue for talking about cannabis that doctors would want to use, versus talking about strains like purple kush or super lemon haze,” says Mettrum’s CEO Michael Haines.
Tokyo Smoke doesn’t sell cannabis in Canada yet, however the clients are on the cusp of launching a type of four marijuana strains south of the border, titled “Go,” “Relax,” “Relief” and “Balance” – names chosen to appeal to the so-called creative class.
“It’s always funny for me to consider sophisticated intellectuals smoking strawberry-cheesecake branded cannabis,” says Gertner.
Another strategy employed by cannabis producers has been to promote the drug to physicians in a bid to boost patient numbers.
Jordan Sinclair, communications manager at Ontario-based grower Tweed, says that while talking to doctors is important, producers also need to find methods to differentiate themselves in the competition.
One method in which Tweed, a subsidiary of Canopy Growth Corp., has set out to do that is as simple as partnering with rapper Snoop Dogg inside a deal announced recently.
“There’s many different producers in Canada, and we’re all growing quite a similar product,” says Sinclair. “You need to ensure that people you as a compelling choice.”
