Pubdate: Tue, 15 Mar 2016
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2016 Postmedia Network Inc.
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Alexandra Posadzki
Page: C4

POT PURVEYORS WORK TO SHAKE STIGMA

Businesses hope to clear haze of dated perceptions surrounding
cannabis

TORONTO - You won't find brightly coloured bongs or bubble
gum-flavoured rolling papers displayed against the backdrop of exposed
brick and modern, industrial-style furnishings at Tokyo Smoke.

Instead, the shop - located in a former shipping dock nestled between
two warehouses in Toronto's west end - carries high-end pot
paraphernalia befitting the pages of a design magazine while also
serving up cups of artisanal coffee.

Pipes handcrafted by California-based ceramicist Ben Medansky sit
alongside a pricey portable vaporizer; a reimagined version of the
French press coffee maker launched via a Kickstarter campaign and a
selection of what shop owner Alan Gertner calls "museum quality
collectibles" - items such as vintage Barbies and a vintage Hermes
bag.

It's all part of Gertner's mission to create a cannabis-friendly
lifestyle brand that caters to the urban intellectual - one that
breaks the mould of dated weed associations involving video games and
junk food.

"I don't think there is a home for someone who's buying Mast Brothers
chocolate and drinking the nicest coffee to have a similar experience
in pot," says Gertner, who quit his job at Google to launch the brand.

"It's no different from someone who has beautiful stemware in their
home for alcohol. We ritualize and love our experiences, and I think
we should have the same thing with cannabis."

The emergence of a luxury cannabis-oriented lifestyle brand like Tokyo
Smoke is the latest development in a saga that has seen the purveyors
of pot work to reshape popular perceptions of the drug.

Until more recently, those efforts have been aimed at trying to
demonstrate the drug's medical legitimacy.

Philippe Lucas, a vice-president at Nanaimo-based grower Tilray, says
decades of propaganda - including the well-known 1936 flick Reefer
Madness - have made rebranding marijuana a challenging task.

"I think the stigma is completely understandable when we look at the
70 years of misinformation, propaganda and drug war rhetoric that's
come out of Canada and the U.S.," says Lucas, who is also the
executive director of the Canadian Medical Cannabis Council.

Adding to the difficulty are Health Canada regulations that prevent
medical marijuana producers from making health claims in their
advertising materials - rules which also apply to the broader
pharmaceutical industry.

Canadian cannabis producers have used a variety of strategies to
change perceptions about the drug, including moving away from the
street names typically used to identify strains.

Mettrum, a Bowmanville, Ont.based grower, uses a colour-coded spectrum
- - red being the strongest, yellow the mildest - to identify each
product's strength and other characteristics.

"We came up with a responsible dialogue for talking about cannabis
that doctors would want to use, versus talking about strains like
purple kush or super lemon haze," says Mettrum's CEO Michael Haines.

Tokyo Smoke doesn't sell cannabis in Canada yet, but the company is on
the cusp of launching a line of four marijuana strains south of the
border, titled "Go," "Relax," "Relief" and "Balance" - names chosen to
appeal to the so-called creative class.

"It's always funny for me to think of sophisticated intellectuals
smoking strawberry-cheesecake branded cannabis," says Gertner.

Another strategy employed by cannabis producers has been to promote
the drug to physicians in a bid to boost patient numbers.

Jordan Sinclair, communications manager at Ontario-based grower Tweed,
says that while talking to doctors is important, producers also need
to find ways to differentiate themselves from the competition.

One way that Tweed, a subsidiary of Canopy Growth Corp., has set out
to do that is by partnering with rapper Snoop Dogg in a deal announced
last month.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Matt