Well, at least they put organized crime out of business.
Canadians who invested in cannabis companies have lost more than $131 billion, according to data collected by law firm Miller Thomson, which calculated the total losses of 183 publicly traded and licenced cannabis producers.
It’s a staggering number that if divided equally between an estimated three million active investors would equate to each losing about $43,000.
Larry Ellis, a lawyer with the firm, points out to CTV National News that he “doesn’t know of many Canadian investors who can afford to lose $40,000 individually.”
Read it all.
In 10 years we will start to see the adverse effects of increased use of cannabis and vaping. Smoking bad, vaping good. Unfortunately the lungs are seriously affected by both. Good thing Canada has lots of respirators because the medical industry will likely need them.
Google “Popcorn” lung, that’s what vaping does to healthy lungs?
For each time the government mentions diversity & inclusion, hundreds of thousands of dollars are lost.
If I were organized crime I would actively persue the legalization of drugs – and fund polticians and partys to push that agenda – because government can never compete with private enterprise (especially when they are paid not to)
If you can’t afford to lose 40k you ought not t be an investor. Stick to diverse mutual funds and GICs
If I was organized crime, I’d set up shop and launder the proceeds of other drug sales through the now legal business. And wait until these newbie businesses fall by the wayside, when you can once again can have a monopoly on pot distribution.
I would very much like to see the loan exposure of the Big 5 banks.
“But HE Legalized Pot”.
Classic government,could not organize a piss-up in a brewery..But they can pass laws and regulation that bankrupt the brewery.
Right from the start,the Legal Pot thing was a scam.
Look to the law changes,a couple of dozen more draconian laws to punish competition and harass “Suspected drunk drivers”..
Then rolled out with dope of hedge-trimmings quality ,followed by shortages and higher costs..
Meanwhile the same old dealers,provided good quality normal priced product..
And the real stoners keep praising Dear Leader,for an inferior product at twice the price..
Can Ahh Duh.
I realized it was going to be the typical government monopoly when I learned, prior to implementation, that the product would be sold de-seeded and First Nations were already agitating for their ‘fair share’ of the revenue stream. It’s always ‘same-old, same-old’ in Canada.
Like I always say, the less you have to do with any government, the happier and better off you will be.
When government makes it too difficult to prosper in your country, you either go to another country or get into non violent criminal activity. Crime pays …. regardless of what you are told. Do what governments do, not what they say.
Law and order is now in a LITE version so as not too hurt feelings.
I’m sure Slitherman didn’t lose $40k slinging weed.
Edit:
“From my perspective I did everything. I applied for all the licences; I did everything. Why should I go bankrupt?” Kostanyan asked.
Their selected example, is a moron who made bad choices, spending over $285K to get up and running 2 doors down from an unlicensed operation that was cheaper and better.
Weed corporations are a dumb idea.
Investors want numbers to improve year over year no?
The chosen few had a good run for a while, selling moldy trash at outrageous prices to pothead who didn’t know any better, but those times don’t last. Market is flooded.with options.
a person can grow better weed themselves or buy it for 1/4 the price from a friend
Just how.much weed can a person smoke? It’s a finite market. I don’t see numbers improving.
When do the Turdhole/NDP Government make smoking weed mandatory?
If you don’t smoke ganja then why should you be tolerated by the Basic Blackfaced Dickhole and his pet Khalistani?
Anyone who invested in pot is an absolute moron and probably votes libtard. Remember when potards were touting tax revenues? “Tax the hell out of it”. Yeah hoes that going Cheech? Every pothead I know won’t set foot in a legit pot shop because of the high price (tax the hell out of it). The cops I know say there’s zero interest in busting black market growers or sellers
Everyone blames the taxes when the base price is the problem.
Production and startup costs are nothing compared to the risk when it was illegal.
Done in by their own greed
The government got greedy and by imposing sky-high taxes, combined with very expensive regulatory compliance requirements, basically priced the legal cannabis market out of competition. In addition, they decided to turn a blind eye to the illegal cannabis market.
Not everyone has the skills necessary to turn a profit in crime.
Reminded me of Reagan’s old line about government, “If it moves, tax it.”
L – Justin Trudeau did what for the illegal pot dealer’s profits?
Then 5 years later, via the Lockdowns, did the same for the hard drug/fentanyl dealers, too.
It’s a good thing, there is no illegal dealer money funding Liberals(or NDP), anywhere in
Canada; because that would look suspicious and require investigation.
Only government can make selling pot a money-losing venture. Before they got involved, every dealer made good bucks.
Government bureaucracy screws everything up.
They even managed to lose money in the casino business.
Former Toronto city councillor George Smitherman (the one Rob Ford trounced in the mayoral election) is the CEO of the Cannabis Council of Canada. That right there should have been a warning to investors.
He got in early and sold at high profit.
Just like in every pyramid scheme.
So did a lot of other highly connected politicians (Liberal, Conservative, NDP).
See the interesting list (and their various conflicts of interest)……….
https://nowtoronto.com/news/cops-politicians-cashing-in-on-cannabis
I quit investing in cannabis when I was 18 or 19. I don’t know where I’d be today if I hadn’t. Definitely one of my better investing decisions.
Same old story.
From tulips to Canadian junior gold miners, to dot-com companies, from Weimar currency to crypto-currency, there will always be investment scams.
It is always those who THINK they got in early and ahead of everyone else that end up losing their shirts.
The fix was in long before any “retail” investor got the chance to get involved.
It wasn’t just Liberal politicians. The number of high-level police officers and former chiefs is staggering….
https://nowtoronto.com/news/cops-politicians-cashing-in-on-cannabis
Anybody else notice the amount of uproar in Canada about returning -ONE- tiny freedom to the people of this country? Hurrah, you are now free to smoke weed… if you follow the textbook-sized list of regulations and so on and so forth. Oh, and pay the tax. Don’t forget the tax, boys and girls. And they managed to loot investors for $131 BILLION as well. That’s a better payday than the windmilll scam.
And for all you people moaning that freedom is too good for people who smoke weed, and it will all come to tears, and there oughta be a law!!!, well, guess what? That’s what makes Canada the People’s republic that it is. You guys.
Some guy wants to smoke weed and rot his brain cells, isn’t that his problem? He’s not an adult, he can’t make his own choices in life and needs Karen to decide for him? How about vaccinations then, hmm? Is there a difference, if you already won’t let people decide for themselves about something like weed?
Why is the government involved here? How is this any of your business, Karen? Maybe shut up, grant people the dignity to make their own decisions, and the world will be a better place.
“Some guy wants to smoke weed and rot his brain cells, isn’t that his problem?”
Agreed. Entirely. 100%.
However, when the SHTF (as it often does), and there’s a subsequent vehicle collision or a medical problem or a homicide or homelessness or some such, and not only am I expected to deal with the fallout, but I’m expected to fund it with my tax $$$, it becomes my problem.
There’s the pointy fence.
Yeah, freedom is too expensive because some guy might get wasted and crash his car.
Remind me, doesn’t the government literally sell alcohol as a monopoly in Ontario? LCBO, ring a bell? Because somebody might get drunk and crash their car, so they can’t let mere retail stores sell it. They have to make sure everybody behaves, right? Oh, and the taxes, gotta have those.
The Liberals planned that for weed too, remember? Because you can’t just un-ban something. You have to CONTROL it, because Canadians are stupid and they’ll all go completely insane getting wasted all over the place and crashing their cars!!! But then that crazy Ford guy sold retail licenses instead of having the WeedCBO, thereby bankrupting a huge number of retailers instead of just p1ssing away tax dollars. Arguably worse. But at least he demonstrated that people don’t go insane and die if they can buy weed from a non-government source.
Meanwhile, $131 BILLION dollars soaked out of investors. Okay? Are you seeing the scam yet? That’s not even the government side, just the investment loss.
I was at the pointy end of this game right at the beginning. I knew all about it. Who the players were, what money was being invested, what the sales projections were, and what the regulations were going to be. I did not invest a penny. Because A) the people involved were scummy Liberals, the kind of guys you want to wash your hands after a handshake and B) given the regulations on growers and retail it was painfully obvious that they were all going to go out of business. For sure.
None of this -ever- had anything to do with people who wanted to smoke weed. They were already doing it, on their own, and asked only to be left alone. A simple law making weed legal to own and grow would have been more than enough. What did we get instead? The scam. $131 billion bucks shoveled into the hands of Liberal party bundlers and hangers-on. It’s obscene.
What do I hear from you? “There oughta be a law!” Which is why they can get away with this crap, time after time after time.
” A simple law making weed legal to own and grow would have been more than enough”
No it has to be legal to sell as well. Otherwise, good on you to call out the BS ‘package deal’ that so many prohibitionists try to pull. No, the costs of someone doing bad thing X that were unjustly socialized do not justify banning bad thing X.
OK, a number of things, in no particular order.
1) I’m not defending the gov’t decision to sell pot. The gov’t has no business being in business. That is not their job. I saw this as a scam the second the rumours started flying, long before any numbers came out, based on the simple premise that, “Anything the gov’t touches turns to shit”.
2) I never said, “There oughta be a law!”. I said, it was a pointy fence (to be sitting on). I rarely GAF what people do in the privacy of their own home, as long as it doesn’t harm others. When the issue starts is when their habit, be it drugs, alcohol, sex, video games, cell phones, whatever, turns harmful or hurtful to others. Legalities (or lack of them) aside, that is immoral & needs be dealt with. There must be repercussions, accountability, administered by someone, backed by the presence of a written law or moral code. Personally, I’m just as fine dealing with this stuff myself, rather than going through a bloated, biased, bureaucratic, inefficient legal system with questionable results.
3) So, investors lost money. Wah. Happens every day. Apparently they trusted the gov’t when the first rule of gov’t is to never trust the gov’t. Perhaps they learned something.
4) As far as the LCBO is concerned, I don’t care. Apparently it’s entirely acceptable to the people of Ontario and, as such, is their problem. They voted for it. Here in Alberta we’ve been free of the monopoly for decades & have been better for it. IMNSHO, there are far greater gov’t issues than owning the provincial liquor business.
5) You want to entirely rid of laws & be free to do what you want, when you want, where you want & to whom you want. Go for it. Design your campaign & run on it. I’m not a big fan of a lot of laws and gov’t control (interference?) either. But there must be some sort of social order, structure, somewhere. Lines must be drawn & there need to be consequences for those who cross them.
If you can figger out a better way, sans gov’t laws, I’m all ears.
You forgot the outrageous new powers given to police wrt drunk driving. Legislation could have been written by MADD.
This forkup was a result of government over-regulation and especially over-taxation. Could be an easy soft target for Poilievre but he’s more interested in fight the “opioid epidemic” in the dumbest way possible.
every piece of legislation about impaired driving has substantial input from the teetotallers at MADD.
People are stupid. They must be controlled. That’s the central organizing principle of Canadian socialists.
Poilievre ain’t going to save you. He works inside the same system of control. The most he get is the same thing the Liberals are doing, but slower.
Anybody who thinks the CPC is going to end the CBC or repeal gun control is insane.
I have great difficulty finding sympathy for the ‘investors’ who are now losing their shirts. Anyone who has any business experience would not invest based on the hype that was floating around at the time weed was legalized. In order to recoup their investment every Canadian would have to turn into a pot head and the companies all exported their surplus to the US or other large market. There simply would never be the demand to meet the supply. The casual user may go to a pot store to purchase some but that would last them a week or more. The heavy user would be more likely to buy from an illegal source since that supply never stopped. Life is hard. Even harder when you are stupid.
How did you feel about the investors who lost their shirts in the oil patch? Same government, same reason for the crash.
I bet that makes a lot more sense to you than it does to me. The oil companies are producing a product that everyone needs. Your food does not magically appear at the heated grocery store. No one needs marijuana. People may enjoy it but they don’t need it in the same way as people need petroleum and petroleum based products.
https://tax.colorado.gov/average-market-rate
Retail Bud $658 per pound
Retail Trim $249 per pound
Retail Immature Plant $13 per plant
Wet Whole Plant $126 per pound
Seed $4 per seed
Trim Allocated for Extraction $76 per pound
Bud Allocated for Extraction $277 per pound
Production costs for indoor cultivation is around 600-800$ per pound.
Here in pueblo west there are 3 separate excise taxes. Special, County, State. 25% combined. Due each month.
Then there’s sales tax at retail stores.
State income tax. Federal income tax. Federal has 280e exemption selling illegal drugs which means you can’t use normal accounting deductions, hence punitive taxes.
Can’t use FDIC banks. So checking accounts cost over a grand a month in fees.
40$ a month metrc fee.
Owners badge 500$ year.
State license renewal 2,800$ Pueblo County 4,000$.
All daily batches have to be tested for potency, heavy metals, pesticide, yeast mold and microbial. Couple hundred dollars.
Not sure what the profit margins are on outdoor grows. Hemp grows have been causing THC plants to have seeds which is a profit killer.
Colorado soil causes cannabis to absorb heavy metals in parts per billion. So it’s critical that plants are not exposed to rain run off and are fed special nutrients to prevent heavy metal adsorption. Remediation is not possible so plants have to destroyed for failed testing.
Very few cannabis companies are doing well.
Colorado voters just approved legalized mushrooms. Their stupidity knows no limits.
Excellent. What started in Colorado with MJ spread all around the country and to Canada. May they be a continued trendsetter in expanding freedom.
Canadians are sheep that love the gov’t controlling their access to booze and drugs, and guns, and switchblade knives, and brass knuckles, and cars, and boats, and now ebikes.
Cowards, the lot of ’em.
They deserve what they’re getting, Canadians are the Soviet Man, both on the left and the right.