Article content continued

I don’t see companies that are satisfied with being the best Canadian (medical) cannabis companies. I see companies that want to be the best global cannabis companies

“Recreational cannabis will lead to the demise of medical cannabis? It’s actually been the opposite,” said Clarke, director of pain services at Toronto General Hospital and a University of Toronto professor. “Canadians … want guidance, they want to know how to navigate this stuff.”

Not only are many patients still anxious to involve a physician in their therapeutic use of the drug, he and others say, the tidal wave of publicity around the recreational change has peaked interest in using it as a treatment.

Photo by Louis Pin/Strathroy Age Dispatch/Postmedia Network

In apparent recognition of that interest, Shoppers Drug Mart, the country’s biggest pharmacy chain, is poised to become a major retailer of medical weed, and is already promoting it to doctors.

Industry executives acknowledge that recreational marijuana buyers — “adult-use consumers” in the sector’s jargon — are for now an exponentially bigger pool in Canada than medicinal users. But they insist they will keep making patients a priority, and say growth potential is huge in the dozens of other countries that have recently opened the door to medical use, yet still ban recreational consumption.

“I don’t see companies that are satisfied with being the best Canadian (medical) cannabis companies. I see companies that want to be the best global cannabis companies,” said Allan Rewak of the Cannabis Council of Canada. “They’re looking big, and they are going to win. We are the global leader.”

It was, of course, the medical cannabis stream that gave birth to that industry, and to the government-approved “licensed producers” (LPs) of marijuana that are now also branching out into the recreational market.