Grow Life 420

Visiting one of the handful of legal cannabis retailers in downtown Toronto didn’t even cross Jesse Cree’s mind when he decided to spend $50 to replenish his depleted baggie of pot.

This week he went straight to the Harbord St. location of Cannabis and Fine Edibles (CAFE), an illicit operation that has been his chief supplier of pot for about a year now.

“It’s more of a familiarity thing for me,” Cree said of the motivation behind him favouring CAFE. “It’s the place I rely on to get my weed.”

Experts say buyers’ continued reliance on illegal operations is a strong signal of their preference for those retailers and their products, and a direct knock on the inferior quality and higher prices found at licensed sellers.

– Read the entire article at The Star.

For Blaine Barber it was a blast from his past, a chance to revisit the former Yonge St. HMV store where he had purchased hundreds of records. But this time he walked out of the same address with a different type of product: the kind he can smoke.

“I thought it was going to be much larger,” Barber, 49, said when he walked into the Tokyo Smoke cannabis store. Located north of Yonge-Dundas Square, it opened Monday and saw a steady stream of customers.

The store is intentionally kept small. Store management said demand will dictate the pace at which they expand, with enough room to go up to about 6,000 square feet from its current 1,500 square feet.

– Read the entire article at The Star.

The lineup went around the corner Monday morning on Queen St. W. at the Hunny Pot Cannabis Co., as the first legal bricks-and-mortar pot retailer opened in Toronto at 9 a.m.

Stephanie Shamoon, 20, of Hamilton, could barely contain her jubilation as she walked up to the counter to be one of the first customers.

Shamoon waited in line outside for more than 10 hours. Temperatures fell to a low of -9 C overnight.

“It was beyond worth it,” Shamoon said.

– Read the entire article at The Star.