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Although we have been brainwashed for decades to think that Canadians are exclusively diehard beer fanatics, it turns out that a large majority of the northern nation has been keeping a dirty little secret from the rest of the world – they like getting stoned just as much as they like getting drunk. In retrospect, looking back on the past several seasons of the Trailer Park Boys, this shouldn’t surprise us. A recent report from one of the country’s largest financial institutions shows that life in Sunnyvale is a rather accurate description of how the inebriation culture in Canada likes to get down.
Canadians will drop just as much cash on weed than they do on booze once the country goes fully legal, according to the latest data from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. The bank’s loonie counters have determined that alcohol executives may end up getting pimped out behind taverns across the Great White North in an effort to keep enough booze coursing through the veins of the buzz culture to keep their jobs.
And it didn’t take any next level, psychic handicapping skills to make this determination either. If it did, rest assured we would be beating down the doors of these calculating Canucks to get a leg up on the horse tracks this year. It seems the financial institution simply examined the what’s-what of the illicit pot trade in Canada and discovered that weed and booze are going to end up in a knock-down-drag-out brawl for market share.
“We believe that by 2020, the legal market for adult-use cannabis will approach $6.5 billion in retail sales,” the report reads, according to CBC. “For context, this is greater than the amount of spirits sold in this country, and approaches wine in scale,” the report added.
Ever since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took over the reins of governmental control, one of his primary missions has been to legalize marijuana nationwide. Although there have been a few snags in getting a bill pushed through legislative channels, Trudeau told reporters last week that the country was well on its way to launching a fully legal pot market before the end of Summer 2018. This is when the alcohol trade could have to fight harder to maintain its multi-billion dollar monopoly on inebriation.
Somewhere around 5 million Canadians are already buying marijuana from the black market every year. The consensus is that once the herb goes fully legal, more folks are likely to toss some, or all, of their booze budget into bud and cannabis products. It is wrench in the wheels that Wall Street analysts have been warning their investors about for the past several years.
“We believe alcohol could be under pressure for the next decade, based on our data analysis covering 80 years of alcohol and 35 years of cannabis incidence in the U.S,” Cowen & Company analyst Vivien Azer wrote in client memo. “Since 1980, we have seen three distinct substitution cycles between alcohol and cannabis; we are entering another cycle.”
Some alcohol companies are well aware of the need to capitalize on weed. Constellation Brands, one of the largest brewers in the world, recently invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the development of beers for the cannabis consumer. Other alcohol companies, especially those rooted in the United States, are reportedly waiting to see just how much legal weed hurts booze sales up north before jumping in with both feet. “Canada’s going to be just a wonderful test market for the U.S. to see how it all plays out,” said CFRA Research market analyst Joe Agnese.
But exactly when U.S. alcohol producers will have to deal with this problem is anyone’s guess. Some political analysts predict that marijuana could be legal all across America by 2021.
Mike Adams is a freelance writer for High Times, Cannabis Now, and Forbes. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram