Up on the third floor of a commercial building near the city’s edge is a vision of Canada’s future.
To the sound of throbbing music, hundreds of people jockey around the marijuana-infused products laid out for sale in a pop-up cannabis market. Marijuana cinnamon buns. Marijuana cereal bars and gluten-free cookies. Marijuana foot scrub, bath bombs, lip chap. Marijuana mixed nuts, marijuana sour keys and marijuana cherry tarts.
Amid a haze of smoke, from people taking hits of cannabis distillate from “rigs,” or high-tech bongs, sits a portable Tim Hortons coffee urn, offering shoppers a cannabis version of the classic Canadian beverage — a double double, or double cream and double sugar — infused with tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical that causes a high.
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But the pop-up cannabis market — where everything will remain illegal until next year, when the sale of cannabis-infused edibles and other products becomes legal — beckons larger questions about how cannabis will change the culture of Canada, a country known for multiculturalism, maple syrup, hockey, saying sorry and perhaps soon, its high-grade bud. Will it turn polite and slightly reserved Canadians into laid-back, summery people?
Already, Canadians smoke a lot of pot.
Statistics collected by the national census bureau reveal that 42.5 percent of Canadians have tried marijuana and around 16 percent have used it over the past three months. A 2013 Unicef reportfound that among people ages 15 to 24, one-third had consumed cannabis in the previous three months — making Canadian youth the biggest partakers in the world.
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