Cannabis – a growing industry in Canada?

The town of Smiths Falls has a cinematic familiarity to it, with its scenic location by the Rideau Canal amid a network of lakes. Driving through its wide streets, you see a mixture of styles and sizes of houses that look like so many scenes from US television shows and films: wooden porches, squirrels and/or raccoons nibbling on the occasional opened trash bag; pick-up trucks are plentiful, both parked in driveways and rumbling along the road. In the near distance, there’s the evocative sound of a North American train whistle.

This is not America, however. This is Eastern Ontario, Canada, a country that has recently become the second nation on the planet (after Uruguay) to fully legalise the recreational use of cannabis. It will come into effect on October 17, and Smiths Falls is gearing up to be the epicentre of this stoned new world.

In an industrial park on the outskirts of town lies the largest cannabis production factory in the world, located in what was once a Hershey’s chocolate factory, it’s a modern-day adult equivalent of Willie Wonka’s famous fictional confectionary premises.

The name of the factory is Tweed. Along with Snoop Dogg’s Leaf by Snoop, it is one of holding company Canopy Growth’s primary recreational brands. It’s already enough to give you a dose of the giggles but this is a serious business that is about to go stratospheric when Canada’s laws change in the coming months.

Canopy Growth is already a big player in the medicinal cannabis market with one-third share of the Canadian market and more than 75,000 customers, as well as export sales and operations in nine countries.

When legalisation for recreational use comes into law all across Canada, the market for what they’re making will explode.

The shell of a new extension — which will increase the factory footprint six-fold and include a visitors’ centre — is already up with machines and crew working hard to complete it.

“We’re currently hiring approximately 50 new people every week and plan on hiring 2,500 in 2018,” says Tweed’s director of communications Caitlin O’Hara (whose grandfather came from Cork). She joins us in the company’s spacious reception area straight from the announcement of a new acquisition of a production facility in Lesotho.

“We are hiring across a variety of departments, from administrative, to IT, production/processing and engineering to learning/training/development, HR and customer care… It’s a perfect choice of location for the plant here — we’re near Ottawa, we’ve got the railway running through here, we’ve a big factory space and a large pool of people nearby.”

Smiths Falls and the surrounding area will be transformed by the success of Tweed, she says. “Canopy Growth is now the world’s largest publicly traded cannabis company, and by far the largest private sector employer in the region — all because the town of Smiths Falls took a chance and welcomed us four years ago.

“The local economy has benefited significantly, not only from high levels of employment but also from spill-over economic opportunities, such as construction jobs, enhancing local businesses, event hosting, and so on. Smiths Falls is now seeing more young people relocating to the town south-west of the nation’s capital Ottawa. There’s renewed interest in commercial property, new businesses are arriving, and there are even bidding wars on homes.”

Her enthusiasm is infectious as we don our white lab coats, hats, and protective shoe gear. Inside, the factory reeks of weed as we come to a big room behind glass in which dozens of large cannabis plants are growing. “These are all moms,” she says of the array of healthy-looking specimens. “They’re all either sativa-dominant hybrid or indica-dominant hybrids. The sativa plants are taller and thinner and they give you energy. These are used for products that will leave you more clear-minded and put pep in your step, whereas the indica products are more for sleep with pain.

“We go through the stages of growth and we start with the ‘moms’ and then they turn into clones and then we move them into the vegetative rooms. There, we don’t want them to flower. We trick them into thinking it’s spring so they don’t produce flowers — they just grow bigger and stronger.

“And once they’re ultimately healthy and big, then we’ll move them into another room — a flowering room where we’ll trick them into thinking it’s summer and then they’ll produce flowers.”

After that, there are plenty more processes involved in extracting the essence from the buds, or flowers, and engineering that essence for certain products. For example, marijuana oil used in treating children’s epilepsy is engineered so that you get all the benefits of the marijuana but not the high.

Some of the processes were too commercially sensitive to be shown to journalists and it was forbidden to take photographs. This is a brand new market, after all, and Tweed has been inventing and designing machinery to adapt to the exigencies of the market in this brave new world of legalised recreational cannabis.

The list of products is growing and the possibilities are mind-boggling and seemingly infinite. “Our primary product formats include dried flower (bud), extracted oils, and softgel tablets. We also have a topical oil product called Foria. Foria is our female sexual enhancement product. It’s one of the only products of its kind on the market. These are currently sold to our medical customers through our online marketplace.

“We’ll be working with Constellation Brands to develop cannabis-infused non-alcoholic beverages to be sold in the recreational market once laws permit. As these beverages will not have alcohol, they won’t damage your liver or cause hangovers, and they’ll be calorie-free, so much easier on your waistline but will provide a similar euphoric effect to other methods of ingesting cannabis.”

The entire facility is clean and clinical as s pharmaceutical factory might be. When the visitors’ centre is open at the end of this summer, the public will be able to get a good look at it all using the elevated walkway that was in use during its days as a chocolate factory.

It was only four years ago that cannabis for medicinal purposes was legalised in Canada. During his election campaign, current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed to go further and legalise it for recreational use — a promise he’s now coming good on and one that sees Canada at the forefront of a world trend.

Nine US states have joined a growing list of jurisdictions where cannabis use is permitted for both medicinal and recreational use.

Many people are unaware that making cannabis illegally is a relatively new phenomenon historically speaking, with Canada having banned it in 1923.

In Ireland, the use of cannabis and cannabis resin has been illegal for just over 70 years, after a law under the Dangerous Drugs Act came into force in 1937.

Medical products based on cannabis are allowed in Ireland on a case-by-case basis at the discretion of the Minister for Health. A bill is currently in the pipeline to allow cannabis use for medicinal purposes on a general footing.

With a long history of attracting large pharmaceutical companies to our shores, the success story of Smiths Falls could be a hazy glimpse of the future for similar-sized towns in Ireland.