Walk into a convenience store in Colorado and you might encounter Toast — the new face of marijuana marketing. It’s smokeable cannabis in the form of machine-rolled cigarettes, each tipped with a royal-purple filter embossed with a gold-foil butterfly. The package is jet black, with the label embossed in gold, deco-style type.
The effect is one of sophisticated, rakish elegance — a cocktail-chic approach to a drug typically sold in plastic baggies in city parks. Marijuana is legal for recreational sale and consumption in Colorado. Toast’s makers are pursuing an upscale demographic: well-heeled users who smoke socially and can afford a premium product.
It’s the kind of thing Canadian cannabis producers would very much like to do with their own product once the legal recreational market is in place here. They’re probably going to be disappointed.
Bill C-45, the Trudeau government’s marijuana legalization bill, includes a long section on branding, packaging and promotion of recreational cannabis. The limits set in the bill are broad brushstrokes — details will have to wait until the bill is passed and regulations are introduced — but they’re built around the government’s primary source of political anxiety: the risk that the legal, licensed product might fall into the hands of minors.
Canadian Bar Association – Doug Beazley – May 25, 2017.
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