Worry grows alongside local dealer’s weed

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This article was published 20/10/2017 (3247 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg man who grows and sells marijuana says he has no plans to stop after legalization, even in the face of competition from a much larger cannabis industry that will be doing business out in the open.

The man, who agreed to speak about his business on condition of anonymity, said he started growing weed for his own use in the late 1990s. He’s been selling his product since 2005.

“I’m not buying big homes and golden cars or anything. It just puts a few extra bucks away for the future, because who knows what the future holds?”

“I couldn’t smoke everything I was growing,” he says. “And all my friends that I hung out with, every single one of them smoked marijuana. So it was very easy to get rid of it.”

The man grows 25 cannabis plants at a time in a specially equipped room in his Winnipeg home. A crop cycle takes between eight and nine weeks, he says, and yields between 5-1/2 and seven pounds of dried marijuana.

He sells most of it to three other dealers, who pay a wholesale price ranging from $1,700 to $2,000 a pound. (For reference, a pound is roughly 450 grams, and one gram of cannabis is enough to roll two or three joints.)

He also sells smaller amounts of cannabis to friends and acquaintances at more lucrative retail prices. Those customers pay $45 to $50 for a quarter-ounce of marijuana, or roughly seven grams. That works out to about $3,000 per pound, he says.

All told, he figures his profits are between $8,000 and $10,000 every three months. He also has a full-time job.

“I’m not going to retire from it,” he says. “I’m not buying big homes and golden cars or anything. It just puts a few extra bucks away for the future, because who knows what the future holds?”

Concerned about legal competition

Justin Trudeau’s federal government is banking on the future putting an end to the Winnipeg man’s retirement plan and the rest of the black-market weed trade. When the Liberals announced Bill C-45, The Cannabis Act, at a press conference in April, Member of Parliament and former Toronto police chief Bill Blair described existing marijuana production and distribution as “a business overwhelmingly controlled by organized crime.”

The Winnipeg grower said he doesn’t fit into that category.

“They’re talking about the growhouses… idiots that grow five, six, seven hundred plants,” he says, adding he worked — briefly — selling weed for a gang when he was younger.

“Everything to do with marijuana has been decided by people like me, and now it’s going to be decided by big corporate business.”

“I was young and wanted easy money, but there was a high risk and I didn’t do that too long,” he says.

Now, he’s concerned about how legal competition will impact his business.

“They have these huge companies that are going to be growing lots of weed… but it really depends on what they’re going to be charging,” he says.

If legal prices drop below $120 for an ounce, growing and selling will no longer be worthwhile. (An ounce is just over 28 grams, so $120 translates to about $4.25 per gram.) However, he believes he has a major advantage over the upcoming legal regime: low overhead.

“My costs are low enough where I can get rid of it for a low price,” he says, adding he’ll try the legal stuff in order to gauge the quality of his competition.

For obvious reasons, he’d like things to stay as they are.

“Probably a lot of people don’t want to hear this, but as a grower, I don’t want legalization to happen right now,” he says. 

“Everything to do with marijuana has been decided by people like me, and now it’s going to be decided by big corporate business…. Everybody’s going to want to make a buck, right?”

solomon.israel@freepress.mb.ca 

@sol_israel