TORONTO – You won’t find brightly coloured bongs or bubble gum-flavoured rolling papers displayed from the backdrop of exposed brick and modern, industrial-style furnishings at Tokyo Smoke.
Canada’s licensed pot producers face uncertainty after court says patients can boost their own
In a decision Wednesday, federal court judge Michael Phelan gave patients the authority to grow their own marijuana, arguing the current system restricts access to the drug
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Instead, the shop – situated in a former shipping dock nestled between two warehouses in Toronto’s west end – carries high-end pot paraphernalia befitting the pages of a design magazine whilst serving up cups of artisanal coffee.
Pipes handcrafted by California-based ceramicist Ben Medansky sit alongside a pricey portable vaporizer, a reimagined version of the French press coffeemaker launched via a Kickstarter campaign and a selection of what shop owner Alan Gertner calls “museum quality collectibles” – items such as vintage Barbies and a vintage Hermes bag.
It’s all part of Gertner’s mission to create a cannabis-friendly lifestyle brand that caters to the urban intellectual Body that breaks the mould of dated weed associations involving video games and junk food.
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“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 of 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 the luxury cannabis-oriented lifestyle brand like Tokyo Smoke is the latest development in a saga that has seen the purveyors of pot try to reshape popular perceptions from the drug.
Until recently, those efforts have been targeted at attempting 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 believe the stigma is completely understandable whenever we consider the 70 many years of misinformation, propaganda and drug war rhetoric that’s emerge from Canada and also the U.S.,” says Lucas, who’s also the executive director from the Canadian Medical Cannabis Council.
Adding towards the difficulty are Health Canada regulations that prevent medical marijuana producers from making health claims within their advertising materials – rules which also apply to the broader pharmaceutical industry.
Canadian cannabis producers used a number of ways of change perceptions concerning the drug, including moving away from the road names typically used to identify strains.
Mettrum, Bowmanville, Ont.-based grower, utilizes a colour-coded spectrum – red to be the strongest, yellow the mildest – to identify each product’s strength and other characteristics.
“We created a responsible dialogue for talking about cannabis that doctors would want to use, versus referring to strains like purple kush or super lemon haze,” says Mettrum’s CEO Michael Haines.
Tokyo Smoke doesn’t sell cannabis in Canada yet, however the clients are around the cusp of launching a type of four marijuana strains south from the border, titled “Go,” “Relax,” “Relief” and “Balance” – names chosen to attract the so-called creative class.
“It’s always funny for me to think of sophisticated intellectuals smoking strawberry-cheesecake branded cannabis,” says Gertner.
Another strategy utilized by cannabis producers is to promote the drug to physicians inside a bid to enhance patient numbers.
Jordan Sinclair, communications manager at Ontario-based grower Tweed, states that while talking to doctors is essential, producers also need to find methods to differentiate themselves from the competition.
One way that Tweed, a subsidiary of Canopy Growth Corp., has attempted to do this is as simple as partnering with rapper Snoop Dogg in a deal announced last month.
“There’s lots of different producers in Canada, and we’re all growing quite a similar product,” says Sinclair. “You want to make sure that people you like a compelling choice.”
