Speaker 1: Dr Mark, Ware the vice chair of Canada's taskforce on cannabis legalization and regulation discusses the fact that adult use cannabis legalization as a matter of how not if in Canada, Dr. weird takes questions from the lift cannabis expo audience which cover everything from the endocannabinoid system to each of the potential distribution systems, the task force's considering, but first Jeremy Jacob gives us an on the ground account of the dispensary licensing happening as we speak in Vancouver and Victoria, the province of British Columbia, and those aforementioned cities are behaving like geographies you know and love in the US. Jeremy also takes us through his new position as the head of the Canadian Association of Medical Cannabis dispensaries. Welcome to cannabis economy. I'm your host Seth Adler. Check us out on social with the handle can economy. That's two ends of the word economy. Dr. Mark were preceded by Jeremy Jacobs.
Speaker 2: Oh, there you have it. Oh, okay. Now we've got it. All right. Okay. We go, Jeremy, Jacob, I walk up to you and I say I know you and you say, yeah, you know me. And I said, how do I know you and what did you say last year in Vancouver at the, at the business or the cannabis economy conference. And there we go. My wife and I were lucky enough to attend and had a great time meeting seth and uh, you know, experiencing cannabis from an international perspective. Indeed. What are you doing here in Vancouver? What is, what's your whole thing? Because you're a busy guy keeping really busy these days. So we've got our, our shop, our dispensary, the village which is right near Granville island in the waterfall building on West Second Avenue. We just recently went to the board of variance and one our appeal by a unanimous vote. So we're, we're moving ahead with the licensing process and we're going to become a licensed dispensary in Vancouver, which is amazing.
Speaker 3: It is amazing. There are now three licenses out there. Um, take us through, you know, a lot of what we talk about here is regulations, licensing, legislation, etc. You know, what, what is the city of vancouver doing and how are you, uh, obtaining that license, how, how hard is it to do what you're doing, knowing that you're not just yet.
Speaker 2: Well, You know, the city of vancouver is one of the first major canadian citizen or city to move forward and regulate dispensary's of victoria just passed the regulations, second major city in Canada. And so now both major cities and vancouver are regulating this industry, which is a fabulous thing to see happening. We're a bit ahead of the rest of the country, but we're hoping that they catch up because I think it will be best for patients and, and best for our communities. So the Vancouver process started with proximity to schools and community centers. They have a distance requirement, uh, and then, uh, they have a demerit system where they assess businesses. We were drawn into a clustering process. Uh, we had to prepare and what's the clustering process? Let's just cover that. Okay, good. Uh, well when, when you got dispensary's that are located within 300 meters of each other, that's the city's yardstick, 300 meters.
Speaker 2: So you've got to then go through their point system and if different shops all have the same number of directs, you get drawn into a lottery where they literally, it's a random draw and they pick names and those guys got to proceed. The others are asked to relocate. Interesting. So relocating is a very much like being forced to close your doors. Well you are being forced to close your Georgia somewhere else, but it's not a given that you're going to find another space. Of course not. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, it, it becomes now a pretty important thing to when your variant. So we were, we had a good case. We were able to go to the board, present our case. We were granted our variance based on hardship to our members, our patients, and on the quality of the business we were running.
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