The future of cannabis consumption may not involve the cannabis plant at all.

“Years from now, most of the [major cannabis producers] aren’t going to grow a single plant,” Boris Jordan, founder of investment firm Measure 8 Venture Partners, said Tuesday at the GMP Securities 2019 Global Cannabis Conference in Toronto.

Jordan and other industry-watchers expect that demand for edibles, vapes, oils and other non-leaf cannabis products will eventually overtake the more traditional form of the drug.

Data backs them up. Flower-based products made up 66.1 per cent of the Colorado market in 2014 and only 54.1 per cent of the market in 2017, according to Miles Light, a University of Colorado economist with the Marijuana Policy Group.

When it comes to the fastest-growing industries on the planet, it's supposed to be marijuana -- and everything else. The global cannabis industry is expected to see sales expand by 38% in 2019, according to a report released earlier this year by the duo of Arcview Market Research and BDS Analytics, then hit between $50 billion and $75 billion in annual sales by the end of the next decade, up from $12.2 billion in 2018. This type of growth story usually only comes around once or twice per generation.

Note that I said "supposed" to be the fastest-growing industry on the planet. You certainly wouldn't know it right now by looking at the Canadian marijuana market.

The Green Rush. The Cannabis Boom. The Marijuana Miracle. Call it what you want, but lead, follow, or get out of the way because, really, the best metaphor for the cannabiz right now is a Green Tsunami. A huge surge has washed ashore in North America, and Main Street USA is about to be flooded with waves of green.

Launched officially on Tuesday, the Association québécoise de l’industrie du cannabis (AQIC) also wants to have a voice in the debate around the legal framework of the substance, the recreational consumption of which has been legal since last October.

Cannabis Business president Michel Timperio, who also directs the cannabis division of Neptune Wellness Solutions, believes there is still a lot of stigma surrounding the industry.

“People have to realize that the cannabis industry is not only what is sold at the Société québécoise du cannabis (SQDC),” he explained in an interview with Presse Canadienne. “There is a long way to go.”

It’s a good day for farmers all across Ontario, especially for those growing cannabis as their primary crop.

Ontario’s Ministry of Agriculture has announced that cannabis growers in the province will now be able to apply for a variety of federal and provincial grants.

This will be huge for all federally licensed growers, as many of them have found a home in Ontario — of 163 licensed facilities nationwide, Ontario is home to nearly half.

Growers can see the full list of grants for production, as well as the full list of grants for those in the processing business.

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Cannabis has been legal for many months now but the controversy over Vancouver's annual 4/20 weed celebration event hasn't subsided.

The Vancouver Park Board held an emergency meeting Monday night and passed a motion asking organizers to cancel a scheduled concert by Cypress Hill, in an effort to control crowd size.

"I consider that request to be ridiculous," said Dana Larsen, one of the organizers of 4/20. "Obviously, we're not going to be cancelling."

Despite cannabis now being legal, he's adamant the need to protest isn't over.

This month, Canada will observe six months since marijuana was legalized. The culmination of a Justin Trudeau campaign promise made in 2015 took longer than originally anticipated and has endured its share of setbacks.

At this point, there is a minuscule number of stand-alone marijuana stores operating across the country and most legal sales are being conducted through the mail. British Columbia’s government calculated it would garner $200 million in cannabis tax revenue over the first three years after legalization, but the figure was recently revised to “just” $68 million. The slow process to open stores is partly to blame for this alteration.

Michelle Gray says she's afraid to get behind the wheel again after having her licence suspended for failing a cannabis saliva test in Nova Scotia, even though she passed a police administered sobriety test the same night.

Gray has been using medical marijuana for almost eight years to treat multiple sclerosis and she plans to launch a constitutional challenge to the law and roadside test.

"They should not be on the streets and used for testing cannabis impairment," said Gray, who lives in Sackville. "I think the government legalized cannabis way too fast. I don't think it was a well thought out plan."

What happened

Shares of Village Farms International (NASDAQ:VFF) closed Tuesday trading down 10.9%. The drop came after short-seller Citron Research published a scathing report online expressing the view that the marijuana producer is "nothing more than a stock promotion" that warrants investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.