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It’s all part of Gertner’s mission to create a cannabis-friendly lifestyle brand that caters to the urban intellectual — one that breaks the mould of dated weed associations involving video games and junk food.

“I don’t think there is a home for someone who’s buying Mast Brothers chocolate and drinking the nicest coffee to have a similar experience in pot,” says Gertner, who quit his job at Google to launch the brand.

“It’s no different from someone who has beautiful stemware in their home for alcohol. We ritualize and love our experiences, and I think we should have the same thing with cannabis.”

The emergence of a luxury cannabis-oriented lifestyle brand like Tokyo Smoke is the latest development in a saga that has seen the purveyors of pot work to reshape popular perceptions of the drug.

Until more recently, those efforts have been 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” — have made rebranding marijuana a challenging task.

“I think the stigma is completely understandable when we look at the 70 years of misinformation, propaganda and drug war rhetoric that’s come out of Canada and the U.S.,” says Lucas, who is also the executive director of the Canadian Medical Cannabis Council.