Over the weekend, Canada celebrated the two-year anniversary of recreational cannabis being legalized. A lot has changed since the opening of the recreational market and our readers need to be aware of this. Many companies that were once considered to be leaders are on the verge of bankruptcy and this is a trend that has raised eyebrows

Today, we have highlighted seven Canadian Licensed Producers (LP) that have recorded transformational changes since the legalization of recreational cannabis in Canada. We believe that some of the companies that were highlighted will survive the current market environment, while others will fail.

A new report from the Cannabis Council of Canada, which represents some of the country’s largest licensed producers, including Canopy Growth, Tilray, and Cronos Group, has graded the government’s performance over the first two years of legalization with a ‘C’ average.

If you’re looking to grow your knowledge about hemp, take a look at some of these facts and spread them far and wide

1. Hemp cultivation dates back more than 10,000 years

Many civilizations throughout time have grown hemp and utilized the plant for a number of items from food to fiber. The ancient use of hemp has been traced to many countries including China, Egypt, Russia, Greece and Italy.

2. It used to be illegal to not grow hemp

There was once a time in American history when farmers could actually be fined or jailed for not growing hemp. Because it was such a valuable crop in Virginia, the Assembly of Jamestown Colony passed legislation in 1619 making it mandatory for every farmer to grow Indian hempseed.

Cannabis-based drug testing is an inhumane process.

Having to turn over bodily fluid to a stranger, including urine or blood, can be an invasive, humiliating experience.

Many employers and industries require cannabis-based drug testing, including professional sports.

Most international sports competition leagues and/or regulatory bodies subject athletic competitors to various types of drug testing and it almost always includes cannabis.

Alberta’s limit on cannabis shop ownership to 15 per cent of the province’s total number of stores is going up in smoke.

On Nov. 1, the cap imposed by the former NDP government, which also set a maximum number of outlets owned by a single entity at 37, will disappear.

Two years into recreational marijuana legalization, the fledgling market is mature and stable enough to allow a move to reduce bureaucracy and enhance competition, Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis (AGLC) said in an email.

“Removing the ownership cap is part of government’s red-tape reduction strategy aimed at creating new opportunities for businesses in Alberta and removing unnecessary regulatory barriers,” it said.

An Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) raid this week in Norfolk County revealed a massive, indoor cannabis grow-op with plants estimated to be worth just shy of $800,000.

Coupled with other police services in the area, the raid of what looked to be a warehouse-type structure resulted in seizing about $796,000 in cannabis plants and $20,400 in processed marijuana.

In 1923, when it became illegal to possess cannabis in Canada, very few Canadians would have heard of the drug, let alone tried it.

So why did legislators target weed?

Cannabis advocates have long blamed women’s rights activist Emily Murphy. Her 1922 book on the drug trade in Canada, The Black Candle, claimed that marijuana users “become raving maniacs” and “are liable to kill or indulge in any sort of violence.”

Most of us like to believe that scientific inquiry is governed by a spirit of curiosity and neutrality, investigating the subject of study from every possible angle. Unfortunately, when it comes to cannabis research in the United States, the approach has been largely one-sided.

According to a new analysis of cannabis research funding in the US, Canada, and the UK, about $1.56 billion went toward cannabis research between 2000 and 2018. Roughly half of that funded research focused on the potential harms of cannabis.

Individual years proved even worse. For example, in 2018, research on potential harms of cannabis received more than 20 times more funding than research on cannabis therapeutics.

Home cannabis cultivation has been legal for adult use since 2018, and for medical use for years before federal legalization came into force.

But Brighton, Ontario’s medical cannabis users who grow their own medicine may soon find themselves in a difficult position, thanks to their neighbours’ complaints.

The legal cannabis industry continued to make inroads against its illicit counterparts, as one-quarter of all sales took place among regulated players in the first quarter of the year, according to new data from the Ontario Cannabis Store.

The provincial pot distributor's quarterly review showed that the province controlled a 25.1-per-cent share of the cannabis market in the fiscal first quarter of 2020, a slight uptick from the 24.7 per cent share observed in the previous quarter. The number lagged behind the national share for the legal market, according to OCS and Statistics Canada calculations.