Yo, listen up! In 2022 and the first half of 2023, Canada straight-up wasted a mind-blowing 611.7 million grams (yeah, that’s 1.3 million pounds) of dried bud, and it ain’t no joke. This ain’t some fun way of gettin’ rid of marijuana, my dudes. All that green was tossed out by licensed producers because they grow way more than people actually smoke.
They chucked out almost 44% more weed than last year when they destroyed 425.3 million grams. But here’s the real deal, according to Health Canada, those numbers only count the weight of the weed that was thrown away without packaging. So you gotta wonder, how much more cannabis did they waste if you add in all the packaged stuff? It could be way more than 2 billion grams, my friends.
Farrell Miller, an industry expert and consultant, knows what’s up. She says most of this wasted product was too old and had too little THC. Ain’t nobody wantin’ that weak stuff, man. So the manufacturers of finished products ain’t buying it as inputs. It’s low-quality material with no value, you feel me? As people get smarter about checking the packaging dates on their weed, this trend of wastin’ herb is only gonna continue.
If this wastefulness keeps goin’ at the same rate from July to December 2023, it means Canada’s cannabis industry has already reached its peak in terms of supply-demand mismatch. They tryna find a balance, even though it’s a real waste (and terrible for the environment). Canada may have been the first big country to legalize adult-use weed back in 2018, but turns out Canadians ain’t smokin’ enough to keep up with all that supply. MJBizDaily estimates that over 1.7 billion grams (that’s 3.7 million pounds) of unsold and unpackaged dried flower have been thrown out. And that’s not even countin’ the packaged products, man. Around 24 million packages of cannabis have also met the same fate since 2018.
After Canada made recreational cannabis sales legal, everybody and their grandma started growin’ the plant. From 2017 to around 2020, before the pandemic hit and during the cannabis stock boom, analysts and investors were more focused on how much weed these companies could produce rather than how much they actually sold. This got the licensees all hyped up and they started puttin’ all their money into these massive greenhouses. But here’s the thing, that model ain’t sustainable, my dudes. These huge grow areas couldn’t deliver the premium, high-THC cannabis that people wanted. So there was a big gap between how much weed they produced and how much people actually wanted to buy.
Marie Sweeney, a cannabis team adviser at Cannabis License Experts, knows why they’re wastin’ so much herb. She says it’s ’cause a bunch of weed businesses shut down and they gotta get rid of any unsold products if they don’t sell ’em before their permits expire.
According to MJBizDaily, Sweeney also points out that the new labeling standards for high-THC products are a big issue. People want that strong weed, you know what I’m sayin’? But that means there’s too much lower THC but still good quality weed in the market. Lots of wholesalers won’t even touch products with less than 20-25% THC, man. And on top of all that, many companies don’t have solid business models. It’s a mess, my friends. There’s just way too much weed being produced.
So what’s the solution to this heartbreaking problem of wasted weed? Miller thinks the Canadian government needs to get its act together and work closer with provincial regulators and cannabis license holders. “They keep giving out licenses without any limits, man,” she said. “That’s why there’s too much supply. If they coordinated better and had more insight into what actually gets sold in stores, it would help manage all this excess product.” See, only the federal government gives out production licenses, but the provincial and territorial governments handle the retail side. They gotta work together to fix this oversupply issue.
She also says that growers with licenses need to figure out how to grow weed with enough THC if they wanna sell it. “Retailers all over the country are buying mainly high-THC products,” she said. “Licensed growers and manufacturers end up with weed that can’t be sold or used for making strong products, so it often gets destroyed. If the federal government communicated better with retailers and had more control over production, it could balance things out.”
So there you have it, my friends. Canada is wastin’ so much weed it’ll make your head spin. But with better coordination and smarter growing practices, maybe we can put an end to this madness and start enjoying all that herb instead of tossing it in the trash. Stay smoked out, my dudes!
