XPost: alt.pot, alt.true-crime, can.politics
XPost: van.general, bc.general
From: gregpcarr@yahoo.ca

Statistics Canada has published new data on the street value for
cannabis showing it could cost at least 13 per cent less than the
proposed legal price.

The price point will be crucial as nearly a century of prohibition
ends: While some people may be willing to pay a slight markup for the
quality and security of the legal product, others may opt for the
cheaper, underground supply, especially if they are already used to
buying it that way.

Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced a week ago that the
price that the provinces and federal government are proposing for
legal cannabis is $10 a gram including a federal excise tax of $1 or
10 per cent, whichever is higher.

That would make legal cannabis considerably higher than the $8.84 per
gram a Statscan report released on Monday found people were willing to
pay on the black market in 2015.

That study found Canada's underground cannabis trade was worth as much
as $6.2-billion in 2015 – almost as much as the legal wine market. The
report assumed a price range of $7.14 to $8.84 a gram to determine the
market would have represented around 70 per cent to 90 per cent of the
size of the $7-billion wine market in the most recent year Statscan
analyzed. Meanwhile, PriceOfWeed.com, the crowdsourcing site Statscan
plans to use to help it figure out how much cannabis costs on street
corners, currently pegs the average gram of "high quality" dried
cannabis at $7.56, based on almost 10,000 submissions over the past
seven years.

Vancouver Councillor Kerry Jang, co-chair of B.C.'s
provincial-municipal committee in charge of crafting the province's
cannabis rules, said the Statscan report underscores how the federal
government should lower its proposed cost of $10 a gram or risk
letting the underground trade continue to flourish.

"Whether [illegal cannabis] is a dollar or two [cheaper], in this day
and age people will always look for the best price, so why increase
the risk?" said Dr. Jang, architect of Vancouver's landmark cannabis
dispensary bylaw. "Where Ottawa came up with that $10 we have no clue.

"It was a surprise, it was probably a bunch of politicians trying to
figure out how much money they can make or get without actually doing
the research."

Neil Boyd, head of Simon Fraser University's criminology school and a
scholar of drug prohibition, said most recreational cannabis consumers
are likely to pay more for this legal supply, which could offer more
products than their street dealer plus an official guarantee of
product safety from a federal testing regime as well as national
labelling standards.

However, any added charges could make the legal supply less palatable
for consumers, Mr. Boyd said.



"At some point there's a tipping point, where that tipping point is
precisely I'm not sure," he said. "But I'm pretty confident that the
government is not going to allow itself to get usurped by the black
market – they're going to be careful about how they set the price."

Last month, B.C. Premier John Horgan warned cities they can't gouge
cannabis businesses with licensing fees if the province wants to
squeeze out the sizable black market once the drug becomes legal.

Spokespeople for the federal Justice Minister and Liberal MP Bill
Blair, a former Toronto police chief and the Trudeau government's
point man on legalizing cannabis, were unavailable for comment Monday afternoon.

Statscan has tentative plans to do four special household surveys in
2018 asking consumers of black-market cannabis about their habits. The
agency told The Globe and Mail that longer-term, community studies
would be a good idea, but its limited budget does not allow for them
at this time.

In its new report, the agency estimated cannabis consumption in 2015
totalled 697.5 tonnes. It said the number of cannabis consumers and
the volume of consumption need to be approached cautiously because
there are unquantified degrees of uncertainty in the data.

With a report from The Canadian Press

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/street-cost-for-cannabis-lower-than-legal-price-point-statscan-finds/article37363670/
has graphs.


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