Pubdate: Wed, 25 Feb 2015 Source: Hamilton Spectator (CN ON) Copyright: 2015 The Hamilton Spectator Contact: http://www.thespec.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/181 Author: Bill Dunphy Page: A12 HAMILTON BUSINESSES GOING TO POT - HAPPILY City's Estimated 50,000 Users Well Served by Retail In many ways, the recently opened Crazy Bill's on Upper Ottawa Street (the family's third location in a growing chain) is the antithesis of the classic head shop: It's large, bright and airy and the huge inventory is meticulously organized and laid out in neat, well-lit display cases. It could be a jewelry store or a computer parts supply place - but it's a head shop selling everything from $1.29 Zig-Zag rolling papers to a $1,000 limited edition Herbalizer electronic vaporizer. It's a far cry from the black light posters and spacey music of your parents' head shop and very different from the activism-inspired efforts of people such as Melanheadz's Peter Melanson, Kush Pixie's Rebecca Bruce or Chris Goodwin's Up in Smoke cafe. While the activist community is fighting for the creation of a regulated marijuana marketplace, other businesses like Crazy Bill's (owned by the Boake family of Brantford) are focusing and thriving on the growing and unambiguously legal market for "paraphernalia" (glass pipes, vaporizers, rolling papers, etc.). And that part of the cannabis business is doing very well in Hamilton, evidence of the strong and growing use of cannabis in the city. How strong and growing? Convenience stores in every corner of the city sell papers, pipes and weigh scales. Some even sell marijuana seeds. Getting real numbers is tough. Extrapolating from federal and provincial data supplied by Health Canada, a reasonable estimate pegs the number of cannabis-using Hamiltonians at 50,000 or more. Similar extrapolations suggest Hamilton has about 600 people who hold legal permits to possess medical marijuana. Many believe that last number is expected to explode over the next decade, perhaps tenfold, as the federal government struggles to create a multibillion-dollar industry to supply legal, regulated medical marijuana to Canadians. More than 1,200 companies have applied for permission to begin producing medicinal pot, including one with former Ontario premier Ernie Eves on the board. At least three are known to come from the Hamilton region. So far Health Canada has approved 23 producers, 15 of which have begun registering patients. In anticipation of the growth of medicinal marijuana users, companies have sprung up offering to guide consumers and their physicians through that process - even connect them to a doctor by Skype to obtain a prescription - for a fee that runs as high as $400. One of them, MedCannAccess, opened an office in downtown Hamilton last August. But while the supply and access end of the business remains somewhat speculative, when it comes to the hardware, we're seeing hard evidence of growth in local head shops. The Crazy Bill's chain is one of them. The family-run business's move to meet the needs of the cannabis community began when Bill Boake made room in his Brantford convenience store for a few of his son's glass-blowing efforts - pipes for smoking marijuana. They sold well and he added other inventory. In short order, the pipe shelf became a cabinet, the cabinet became two and then three and then four and finally the cannabis merchandise crowded out most of the other inventory. Eight years ago this month, they opened a head shop on King Street in downtown Hamilton, one of only two or three in the city at that time, remembers Bill's son, Ryan Boake. Now there are nearly a dozen. A soft-spoken, neatly groomed retailer, who wouldn't look out of place managing a stationery store, Boake is proud of their third store, opened six months ago in about 2,000 square feet of an Upper Ottawa strip mall on the Mountain. Asked how the expansion is working out, Boake says "we've only been here eight months and already we're running out of room." He also says they hit monthly revenue targets in their Mountain location that took five years to reach at the downtown store. "Hopefully it won't take us this long to open our next store." He says he's already planning his next location. Down the hill - also on Ottawa, coincidentally - is another mainstay of the Hamilton head shop scene: James Lloyd, owner of Where Heads Meet. His second store is slated to reopen in March after being shuttered by a fire in a neighbouring building. Where the Boakes are probably typical of a modern managed family business, Lloyd comes from a scrappier Hamilton entrepreneur mould - he's constantly on the lookout for opportunities to leverage his retail knowledge to make a new buck. "I'm also a liquidator," he explains, "a buyer as well as a seller," and then describes buying up stock from a pair of distressed mother/baby stores and opening up a temporary "Where Moms Meet" store in a nearby storefront he leases. In addition to the usual glass and other head shop paraphernalia, Where Heads Meet features clothing and sculpture and something like 40,000 vinyl records, most in a basement showroom. The north wall is nearly full of a rather amazing assortment of masks - African, South American, Pacific and native, the remainder of a 1,200-strong collection he bought from a collector who was downsizing from a farmhouse to a Toronto condo. Lloyd opened in 2009 and says he's seen the cannabis community - and market - wax and wane in the years since and notes that he himself has bought up the inventory of something like 10 failed head shops in that time. He's a believer in the medicinal uses of marijuana and says he's glad that some of the social stigma around using cannabis seems to be lifting, but he adds, "I'm not a big flag waver (for the legalization movement)." Still while he is a realist in terms of the expansion/contraction cycles of any business, there's no question he's seeing growth - he recently returned from a buying trip to Montreal, where he's in the process of acquiring enough inventory from a failed business there - more than $200,000 worth - which, he says, "will turn me into a wholesaler." [sidebar] SHIFTING LAWS It had been prohibited in Canada since 1923 but things changed in 2000 when the courts ruled that patients had a legal right to doctor-prescribed medicinal marijuana. In response, the government created a centrally regulated system that allowed patients to buy the drug from a government-approved grower, grow it themselves or have a "designated grower" provide it. Users complained about high prices, poor quality and inconsistent supply from the government grower; opponents complained about dangerous grow ops and product redirected to the black market. The government killed those regulations last April and is trying to build a billion-dollar industry to supply cannabis directly to users with a valid prescription. But fears of high prices and objections to the industrialization of the supply process led to an emergency injunction request last March that left the new rules in limbo while a constitutional challenge works its way through the courts. That case is being heard this w! eek, although it's unclear just how quickly the rules will - or won't - change as a result of this case. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom