Trail Blazer Rx: The Future of Legal Weed in Canada
The first time I heard Walters’s voice, about a week before our trip to Aphria, it was a Sunday afternoon. He’d left me a voicemail: “Hi Luc, it’s Scott Walters. It’s about 4:20 p.m.—” A pause, then a laugh. “4:20. Hilarious.”
Walters is 43, and lives with his wife of 20 years and their two children in north Toronto. He wears a pair of black thick-framed glasses and keeps his light, thinning hair neatly cropped. He’s slim and tall with boyishly curious blue eyes and a pair of animated, oversized hands that have a habit of grabbing whatever prop is available—coffee creamers, coasters, water bottles—to illustrate a point. He speaks and dresses modestly and, if you never asked, it would be easy to miss that he’s a Bay Street veteran turned medical marijuana mogul.
Here’s how he got there. Walters was born in Toronto in 1972. He studied computers and economics at the University of Western Ontario in the early 1990s. Over the next two decades, he founded an investment firm that raised $150 million for the uranium sector, started — and then sold — a management company that took on more than $6 billion in assets, and worked as a derivatives trader, hedge fund manager and agri-business consultant for a slew of other companies, including BMO Nesbitt Burns and the Dundee Corporation. But, in time, he became increasingly disillusioned with the industry’s mercenary mindset. “I spent 20 years working with people where everything was about the next buck, the next deal, the next fuck,” he says. “You wouldn’t have liked me. I didn’t like me.”
So, in 2012, much to the surprise of his boss, Walters resigned from Stifel Nicolaus, an American investment bank, and looked for new work. After eliminating his other options—“certainly not oil and gas, bio-tech’s on its ass, forestry is fucked, offshore fishing isn’t working”—he settled on weed.
Walters wasn’t a stranger to the drug. He had first bought hash off the street in downtown Toronto long ago—it turned out to be roofing tar, naturally—and had smoked a bit in high school. In 2010, he started self-medicating with weed to wean himself off the heroin pills he’d been using to treat chronic pain in his back and around his eyes, the side effects of years of heavy drinking and an unhealthy lifestyle. A couple years later, he got a prescription. (On a 10-point pain scale, smoking is said to bring pain down from a five to a one.) He knew the weed world as a patient, but he didn’t quite understand it as a business yet. His first forays flopped: a consulting gig went awry, an idea for a royalties business didn’t pan out, a play in the vaporizer market quickly fizzled.
Then he met a pair of doctors hoping to become medical marijuana pioneers. They knew the medicine—one had studied under a leading cannabis scientist—but lacked the logistics and financing. Walters was their man. He helped them found the Cannabinoid Medical Clinic, a specialized practice where physicians could send patients if they were uncomfortable prescribing the drug. “It’s not a medication that has been thoroughly tested, and there are no treatment guidelines,” Dr. Danial Schecter, one of the clinic’s co-founders, explained to me. “Doctors understand how puffers and inhalers work, but with cannabis, how do you prescribe two puffs three times a day?”
While the doctors worked the science—prescribing medical marijuana and a synthetic cannabinoid called Nabilone, monitoring and studying patient progress, educating physicians on treatment standards—Walters worked the industry. He made visits to scope out Canada’s small selection of legally sanctioned mass producers (where the clinic’s patients would get their bud), became familiar with the quasi-legal unregistered realm and recruited the country’s top pro-pot lawyer. Slowly, he put the pieces in place to support a serious entry into an industry on the verge of exploding.
