Legal cannabis sales exploded in Canada during COVID, McMaster researcher says
Canadians bought more alcohol and cannabis during COVID, a McMaster University researcher has found in one of the first national looks at changes in substance use during the pandemic.
There's been a lot of discussion about the possible mental-health impacts of COVID-19," said James MacKillop, director of McMaster's Peter Boris Centre for Addictions Research (PBCAR), who co-authored the study. He said the sales data offers a window into what we assume reflects differences in behaviour."
The study used Statistics Canada data to compare alcohol and cannabis sales from November 2018 to February 2020 with data from March 2020 to June 2021.
Published Thursday in the journal JAMA Network Open, the study found Canadians bought $1.86 billion more alcohol than expected based on pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, cannabis sales were $811 million higher than predicted over the 16-month study period.
Proportionally, the increase in cannabis sales was much larger than the increase in alcohol sales. During the pandemic study period, mean monthly cannabis sales were more than $255 million - almost 25 per cent higher than the $205 million projected by researchers. For alcohol, monthly sales increased by an average of 5.5 per cent per month.
The increase in cannabis sales was also seen in Hamilton.
Local statistics from the Ontario Cannabis Store, the province's online retailer, show Hamilton sales nearly doubled in July to September 2020 - when 929,000 grams were sold for $8.5 million - compared to April to June 2020, when 474,000 grams sold for $4.9 million.
Sales continued to increase after that, albeit less dramatically. In January to March 2021, a total of 1,389,000 grams sold for $11.5 million. The number of cannabis stores in Hamilton also jumped from two in the first quarter of 2020 to 37 in the same period of 2021.
Hamilton ranked third out of 160 Ontario cities for cannabis retail sales from January to March this year.
MacKillop believed the numbers reflect both an increase in personal use of cannabis and users shifting toward the legal cannabis market during COVID. Legal online markets may have been seen as a safer way to buy cannabis during the pandemic, he said.
Still, the increase in national cannabis sales was stark."
I was surprised," said MacKillop, who's also co-director of the Michael G. DeGroote Centre for Medicinal Cannabis Research.
I expected to see an increase, but 25 per cent above the predicted level is really high," he said, noting in the last month of the research, June 2021, the legal cannabis market was more than $300 million monthly. That's six times higher than it was during the first six months of legalization.
The sheer extent of the expansion and the steepness of that line was pretty remarkable," MacKillop said.
The study was done by the PBCAR, St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton and Homewood Research Institute.
Maria Iqbal is a Hamilton-based reporter at The Spectator covering aging. Reach her via email: miqbal@thespec.com.