People are familiar with Skip the Dishes, and now they can also skip the dealer.
Licensed cannabis dispensers began making home deliveries on Thursday morning, when the practice became legal in B.C.
Dutch Love, for one, made 20 home deliveries with its small, new fleet of electric vehicles. Under the new law, pot providers must deliver their product themselves — they can’t send it by courier or mail.
“It might be the best summer job you’ll ever have, delivering weed to people on a bike in a beautiful environment,” said Harrison Stoker, Dutch Love’s chief growth officer.
Dutch Love has a small fleet of electric vehicles and bikes to service most of the Lower Mainland and Kelowna. Hands shot up when the company asked staff who would like to deliver, Stoker said.
“And strategically, we wanted to be able to access a broader region,” he added. “It’s a tremendous opportunity for us to access a very strong consumer base that is otherwise only being serviced by the illicit market unless people have decided to make the journey to another municipality that has opted into recreational cannabis stores.”
Which brings up the spectre of prohibition.
Some communities, such as Surrey, Richmond and Burnaby — cannabis deserts, Stoker calls them — don’t allow weed dispensaries, but now residents in those cities can get same-day delivery of cannabis from the municipality next door.
“One of the (government) mandates from a public safety and even economic perspective is the dismantling of the illicit market, which still reigns supreme in B.C., and Canada at large,” Stoker said.
Individual retailers and the Association of Canadian Cannabis Retailers are in regular contact with the provincial government in a dialogue about how to dismantle the illicit market, he said.
“Our ask, our perspective if you will, is for (Victoria) to even the playing field as much as possible, ” Stoker said. “This home-delivery piece is a real testament, or gesture, in the right direction because the illicit market, of course, has always and continues to have home-delivery services outside of the realm of the prohibition and policy that we fall under.
“We’ve got a really active dialogue with the province right now, post-home delivery, about mail order, e-commerce, shipping, modern retail features. … It’s 2021, after all.”
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