One year after cannabis legalization in Canada - that's how it went

That Canada is the first G7 country to allow the possession, use and sale of cannabis was no big deal. The medical use of the drug has been legal since 2001 and the view on cannabis has long been both liberal and dramatized.

More than 40 percent of the population aged 15 and up had used cannabis at some point in their lives and around 15 percent had done so at some point in the past three months, figures showed before the legalization.

A year later, we can see that the new cannabis market has created just over 9,000 new jobs, mainly in the manufacturing industry, but that many challenges remain.

One of the more noteworthy problems is that the transition from a black to white market has gone slower than many had expected. This has also resulted in lower tax revenues than was hoped for.

Some of the reasons we find that the supply of cannabis was limited when legalization started as there were few licensed stores in many provinces. In October 2018, there were 100 licensed stores and today the number is 550.

High prices of legal cannabis have also made it difficult to compete with the black market.

The average price for a gram of legal cannabis can be twice as expensive compared to the same product on the black market, according to statistics from Statistics Canada.

However, the success of white cannabis sales varies greatly between the country's different provinces, which partly have different rules regarding cannabis sales - for example, how easy it is to start a licensed store to sell the drug.

However, figures from the country's public health authority show that legal sales are steadily increasing, an important indicator as one of the heaviest arguments for regulating the drug is to shrink the black market.

But so far, we can see that there is a bit left as sales are expected to land at around SEK 10 billion in the first year, while the black market is still estimated to be worth SEK 50-70 billion.

Use then, has it increased? Hardly. It has gone up slightly, from 14.9 percent to 16.3 percent, according to a review at The Conversation.

In the first year of a regulated cannabis market in Canada, it has also not been legal to sell edible or drinkable cannabis. E-cigarette THC oils have also been banned from selling, which however will change in December this year and is expected to significantly increase sales in the legal market.