Joint Ventures

Canadian cannabis legalization can best be described as an imperfect success story. In political terms, Justin Trudeau’s surprise pledge, in 2013, to end prohibition helped propel him from leader of a third party to majority prime minister. Since then, billions of dollars have been diverted from the black market, tens of thousands of jobs have been created, and fewer people have had their lives destroyed by simple possession charges. Yet the jury is still out on whether Ottawa has met its own objectives: keeping cannabis away from young people, taking profits away from criminals, and protecting public health. Canada continues to report some of the highest rates of youth cannabis use globally, unlicensed dispensaries dot our cities, and there is a stunning dearth of research on cannabis’s therapeutic potential.

The appetite to examine these issues has waned considerably, with the early excitement around legalization widely shifting to ambivalence. Canada’s licensed cannabis industry is projected to pull in more than $6 billion (U.S.) this year — but the attention that once surrounded it has all but disappeared. In Catch a Fire: The Blaze and Bust of the Canadian Cannabis Industry, Ben Kaplan looks back on the spectacle that followed the industry’s early days. Some parts of it read like a Shakespearean tragedy, others like a celebration of legalization.

Kaplan offers readers a non-sequential crash course on prohibition and eventual legalization: from the initial cannabis ban, an “afterthought” to the moralistic and racist Opium and Narcotic Drug Act of 1923; to the court-mandated Medical Marihuana Access Regulations of 2001, which enabled a patchwork of do-it-yourself grow‑ops and government weed; to the eventual creation of the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations of 2013, when Stephen Harper, “a teetotaling asthmatic conservative” economist, somewhat reluctantly opened the door for private industry to grow cannabis legally. By the time Justin Trudeau skipped decriminalization to embrace legalization of recreational use, the stage was already set for big business.

At its core, this story is about the people who thrived with legalization and the capital that fuelled the industry — and ultimately left it. Kaplan reminds readers that in the boom of 2018 and 2019, there were sixteen Canadian cannabis start‑ups valued in the multi-billions, fourteen of which were led by Canadians. But at the bust a few years later, 97 percent of the value of those companies was gone, along with all sixteen founders. With hindsight, the speculative nature of legal cannabis was easy to spot, with the novelty and profile of the industry serving as a tailwind to cultivators well before they had actual customer bases.

Initially, profits and market share were of secondary importance, with “funded capacity”— the amount of greenhouse space a company owned — reigning supreme, creating the conditions for investment and scale. The mythology of funded capacity was legitimized by a Deloitte report from 2016 that projected the size of the Canadian cannabis industry at $22.6 billion. Kaplan describes both the impact of this report — it was displayed on “slide three” of every investor deck — and the opportunism of its author, who resigned to take a job in the industry. In a tenuous, scale-obsessed environment, little diligence was paid to business plans or market conditions, let alone a company’s ability to respond to the needs of its customer base. Out of this bubble came a memorable collection of innovators, activists, dreamers, bankers, and grifters.

The Bezos and Zuckerberg of the sector — Bruce Linton of Canopy Growth and Terry Booth of Aurora Cannabis — receive central treatment. Both men, Kaplan writes, “artificially created weed companies with bad weed (which Terry refutes) and market values that were one thousand times sales (which he doesn’t).” Both referred to attention deficit disorder as “a professional advantage,” and both were having the time of their lives.

Linton was a buttoned-down entrepreneur who wasn’t shy about telling people he abstained from smoking weed in his personal life. He “saw the industry as a game of Pac‑Man” where he could “become more powerful eating up other companies, like ghosts.” He built Canopy out of a defunct Hershey factory in Smiths Falls, Ontario, and scaled it to a $20-billion valuation. Amid the success, Linton did not buy a new car or house, but he did think about work twenty-four hours a day. It was his ambition that attracted the attention of Constellation Brands — and a $5-billion bet that ultimately cost him control of Canopy. Within a year of the investment, Linton was out, leaving behind a company hemorrhaging losses and an industry struggling with the comedown.

Kaplan does not hide his admiration for Linton and, at times, gets swept away by the man’s bravado. At one point, he compares Linton’s termination to “a Hall of Fame pitcher being taken out in the third inning after working his whole life for the decisive World Series game.” But while Linton’s strategy brought him global admiration for a time, analysts had a different view of Canopy’s $323 million in losses, and many of his peers believed he never had a chance of long-term success.

Booth is depicted as similarly obsessed with size and scale but brasher, with a more genuine affinity for cannabis and a deeper connection with (most of) his employees. His disdain for the sector’s moneyed interests in Toronto and Vancouver repeatedly resulted in confrontation, with emphasis on his peers’ hypocritical dismissal of legacy market actors. Kaplan illustrates this dynamic with an email dispute relating to the taxation of medical cannabis in 2016. The Canadian Medical Cannabis Industry Association had corralled industry leaders who, for both ideological and commercial reasons, were ready to publish a joint statement calling for tax-free medical cannabis. When a group of executives took exception to the inclusion of “compassion clubs,” Booth laid down the line:

Eric Paul, one of the executives on the chain, weighed in to denounce the “illegals” who were being considered for inclusion in the statement. In an instance of apparent karma, he would later be fired after Health Canada alleged that his company, CannTrust, was growing cannabis illegally.

This anecdote points to a wider issue in the sector: that licensed cannabis has never made peace with its unlicensed roots. In some cases, reliance on unlicensed roots was literal, as licensed cultivators would use dead roots from outlawed growers as “starter seeds” for their own crops. Because of confusing rules about what was and was not allowed, Canada Post refused to handle the cargo, leaving it for the executives to steward the seeds on prop planes. The heads of Canopy and Mettrum (a large grower in Bowmanville, Ontario, that Canopy acquired in 2017) had run‑ins with airport security while transporting hundreds of kilograms of cannabis plants. The RCMP wanted to make arrests for drug dealing, but Health Canada confirmed the shipments were legitimate. Ultimately, no arrests were made. Linton responded dismissively when reminded that his starter seeds had come from biker gangs: “Where do you think it’s from? Little Red Riding Hood?” The sometimes tense, sometimes comedic effort to take an illegal product and scale it in a highly regulated system is a running theme in Kaplan’s account: “Legal cannabis, like the smell of a joint on a blazer, has never been able to shake its illegal past.”

Catch a Fire drifts from one vignette to the next, capturing the frenetic and sometimes delusional energy of those who made weed both a multi-billion-dollar industry and a headline machine. While not predominantly operating with a social justice lens, Kaplan and his subjects acknowledge that the experience of (mostly white male) executives getting rich in the industry deviates significantly from the experience of Black and Indigenous people who were disproportionately harmed by prohibition. He also tells stories of those who paved the way for legalization, including Terrance Parker, who fought for the right to use cannabis to treat seizures and became Canada’s first medical cannabis patient; Aaron Harnett, Parker’s long-time pro bono counsel; and Hilary Black, a compassion club founder and activist who chose, controversially, to take her activism mainstream by joining the executive team at Canopy.

Finally, Kaplan examines the political twists and turns that made legalization a reality. They include Trudeau’s pledge as Liberal leader and accounts of unsung heroes like Tony Dean, an independent senator who fatefully received a cancer diagnosis that required him to use medical cannabis while shepherding the Cannabis Act through the upper chamber in 2018. There’s also Allan Rock, the Chrétien-era health minister, who ushered in Canada’s first government-run medicinal cannabis program, possibly inspired by a brush with John Lennon and Yoko Ono during his student days. Transformative change requires a tremendous amount of work and, sometimes, equal levels of luck.

In a promotional interview, Kaplan mentioned that he got into writing as a way to entertain friends and family when studying abroad in Spain. While he’s moved on to a bigger stage, his writing style remains entertaining — with stories that are hyperbolic and scattered in places but never dull. Other authors may study the end of prohibition more comprehensively, addressing still unresolved questions regarding the cannabis industry’s relationship to public health, consumption habits, consequences for marginalized communities, and progress made in deterring criminal activity. Kaplan did not write that book. Instead he gives readers a front-row seat to the buzz, drama, and breakneck pace of Canada’s legalization. The result is a vivid, nostalgic, and thoroughly engaging read.