• The products went on sale at 9:00 am, January 16. At 8:59 am, there were roughly 3,000 users logged into the OCS website waiting for the new products to appear online.
  CBC Toronto
• Within the first hour, 2,000 customers placed orders. The site crashed for some.
  Bloomberg
• Gummies (officially "soft chews") sold out within 30 minutes. All edibles had sold out by 2:00 pm.
  Twitter—Trina Fraser

• Edibles are "flying off the shelves" in Alberta as well, but not as quickly as in Ontario.
• Some Albertans think the 2.0 rush will spike a craft cannabis boom.
  Alberta Farm Express

• A marketing consultant argued beverages won't win over the market with a 10 mg THC cap per container, regardless of size.
  New Cannabis Ventures

• Lift & Co itself tweeted advertisements for the booth at the opening of the trade show, which made it a target for a criticism from a variety of sources.
  Twitter—Lift & Co, Various
• GTEC debuted BLK MRKT in December as a " brand […] for the true connoisseur, seeking rare top-shelf cultivars with a higher THC."

• University of Toronto sociology professor Akwasi Owusu-Bempah had little patience for the response, calling its arguments "incorrect and highly offensive."
  Mugglehead

• At the moment, the SQDC has 33 stores, and aims to have 40 open by March.
• As part of a December Call For Tenders, the SQDC said it expected to have 56 stores operating by 2023. An SQDC representative said, "As of today, our objective is to reach roughly a hundred points of sale within the next three years."
  TVA Nouvelles—In French

Quick Hits

1. Iqaluit's city council sent the territory's health minister a letter recommending Nunavut open a REC store in the capital city.
   Nunatsiaq News
2. A joint study conducted by Queen's and Western universities found daily cannabis use during pregnancy may cause stunted brain and liver growth in newborns and decrease birth weights.
   Global News

• Negative productions were 93% likely to be correct, while positive ones were only correct 48% of the time.

• "More retails stores and ‘2.0’ does not fix this," Wiggins said. "Something has to give. We need companies to go out of business. […] We need people to write off inventory."
• Wiggins later added, "The next six months in the cannabis industry will be like the opening scene to Saving Private Ryan. A successful few will make it off the beach."
  Twitter—GoBlueCDN
• Geneticist Ryan Lee wondered whether there will be another Lift & Co Vancouver, saying "Attendance seems way down, rumors of a bad financial situation, [and] tweets suggesting a change of direction of the business after going public."
  Twitter—Ryan Lee

• Wholesale sales to other LPs accounted for $9.2M (37%) of the company's $25.2M sales, up more than 1,500% from the previous quarter's $535,000. CEO Greg Engel said he was not certain whether the company will continue to act as a wholesaler.
  Yahoo Finance
• The company also inked a supply agreement with Shoppers Drug Mart's MED portal.
  Press Release
• CEO Greg Engel said, "We’re not going to hit any sense of normalcy or predictability until the fourth quarter of this year."
• Critics found holes in the success: pricing fell 20% in a quarter, only six months' of cash left, and REC market sales down 40% in the past six months.
  Grizzle

• The company downgraded its predicted net revenue for the 2020 financial year from $650–$700M to $575M–$625M, and adjusted its anticipated EBITDA from $88–$95 to $35M–$42M.
  CTV News

• Security and Systems Manager Mike Zmuda pointed out this appeared to breach Ontario's Cannabis Licence Act's prohibition on offering "material inducements or benefit[s]" to those with retail licenses.
  Twitter—Mike Zmuda
• Friendly Stranger announced it granted use of its brand to six Ontario REC retail license holders. NewsWire

• As lawyer Chad Finkelstein called upon the Canadian Intellectual Property Office to improve their 18-months-plus wait for initial trademark applications, lawyer Trina Fraser noted the strange contrast between what is prohibited under Health Canada regulations and CIPO categories of products that may be trademarked.
  Twitter—Chad Finkelstein, Trina Fraser

Quick Hits

1. The Globe and Mail will discontinue its publication Cannabis Insider on February 1 and give prorated refunds to subscribers. The Globe has had a team of great people covering cannabis and my hat's off to them for their fine work. The subscriptions were expensive, but the reporting's top notch.
   GrowthOp
2. The average Canadian is still woefully underinformed about cannabis and the laws and rules that govern its use.
   Policy Options

• One insider noted Loblaw already controls 40% of Newfoundland and Labrador REC. "Toss in [Loblaw property] Shoppers Drug Mart with medical cannabis and safe to say Loblaws has had its eye on this market for some time."
• The date of "anticipated execution of agreement" is July 3, 2020.
• As a Crown company, Cannabis NB opened 20 stores across a variety of New Brunswick communities, and some are significantly more profitable than others. The winner is not required to continue operating all 20 stores, meaning some communities may lose their REC store.

• In 2016, chief medical officers in all provinces and territories along with the chief medical officers of health in 21 Canadian cities strongly encouraged governments not to allow REC to be sold in the same stores as alcohol. Nova Scotia's decision to ignore those recommendations was controversial.
  The Straight, CBC Nova Scotia

Quick Hits

1. In a small Twitter poll of MED users by Wildfire Collective founder Mark Spear, 55.9% of respondents answered "not at all" to the question "Do you feel that your LP is providing the products, price points and customer care you need as a medical patient?"
   Twitter—Mark Spear

• The amount of cannabis seized per seizure has increased, as the number of total seizures only increased by 25% over the same period (from 3,130 in 2018 to 3,917 in 2019).

• Speaking with growers last week, I learned bad flower in a sealed LP container doesn't mean it was bad in the grow room.
• A grower told me he had visited the grow rooms of a number of LPs and in several cases had said, "Underground growers are in trouble: these flowers are for real." However, he said, he hadn't factored in the processes of drying, processing, packaging, and shipping the product first to wholesalers, then to retailers.
• "You can have perfect buds," he told me, "but that doesn't guarantee they'll survive that process. And not that many companies have perfect buds."

Quick Hits

1. It's pretty obvious you can't complain to the Better Business Bureau when an illicit cannabis website takes your $524 but doesn't send you any weed, isn't it? Someone in BC tried that anyway.
   Business in Vancouver
2. A new movie, The Marijuana Conspiracy, dramatizes the still-classified 1972 Ontario-government funded research study Project Venus. During that study, 20 women were split into two groups and isolated indoors for 98 days, while half the group smoked cannabis nightly with THC increasing over the course of the study. They were not allowed to go outside.
   Toronto Star, GrowthOp