Trail Blazer Rx: The Future of Legal Weed in Canada

“Smell that?” Scott Walters asks me, grinning slightly as he breathes in the subtle but unmistakable scent of weed. We’re hardly through the front door, still shivering from the biting cold of a bright, mid-January morning, but the funk is already there, hanging in the warm air as if to say, “Yeah, this is the place.”

Walters is the co-founder of a specialized clinic in Toronto — a clinic that might just hold the key to the future of Canada’s cannabis industry — so he’s taken me on a mission to inspect Aphria, one of his suppliers. It’s a legal grow-op that looks identical to just about every other plot of land in the small agricultural town of Leamington, Ontario, the greenhouse capital of North America. For four decades, the 40-acre farm has raised mostly tomatoes and cucumbers. It still does, but anyone with a functional nose can tell that’s not all they’re growing.

Walters and I sign ourselves in before entering the office, a nondescript smattering of desks and monitors, unremarkable only until you notice the fingerprint scanners at every door, the ceiling-mounted cameras, the barbed-wire fences visible outside the window and the wide-screen TV showing a grid of closed-circuit feeds. First, Walters meets with Aphria’s executive team, an assortment of experienced growers and business types, and talks shop. Then, we don white lab coats and hairnets for the grand tour.

We sign in a second time to get into the growing quarters, where Walters surveys the stock. Marijuana plants of all strains and sizes stretch down the length of the massive greenhouse. As we stroll between small seedlings and fully flowered shrubs, one of Aphria’s co-founders doles out information about ideal lighting conditions, biological control methods and proper airflow. Listening and inserting the occasional question, Walters crouches to pinch the plants and snap a few photos on his smartphone.

To enter Aphria’s vault, a stark-white labyrinth of immaculately clean humidity-controlled labs, we sign in again—three clipboards deep now—and put on plastic blue booties. We weave through stands of shining metal trays and heavy glass doors before entering in the storage room, where tens of thousands of dollars worth of dry bud is waiting to be shipped out and stuffed into the grinders, vaporizers and rolling papers of Canada’s 60,000 prescribed medical marijuana users. Timidly, Walters pries the top off of one of the containers—the kind a high school cafeteria might use for a massive lasagna—and marvels at the half-kilo of cannabis. His face lights up as he takes a whiff of the unfettered source.