Cannabis Stats Hub says 4.9 million Canadians bought cannabis last year

Canadians spent $5.7 billion on cannabis last year, according to new Statistics Canada data

Statistics Canada launched a Cannabis Stats Hub today, where they're publishing cannabis-specific data about Canadians such as usage by province, cannabis crime information and consumer spending by province. In 2017, close to 5 million Canadians between the ages of 15 and 64 spent $5.7 billion on cannabis for both recreational and medical purposes, buying 774.2 tonnes of weed products at an average of $7.43/g, or $1,200/year. They report 90 per cent of those purchases were for non-medical purposes.

They also break cannabis prices down by province: British Columbia has the most inexpensive weed at an average of $6.94/g and the Territories have the most expensive, calculated to be $9.52/g. Prices peaked in 1989 at about $12/g and has trended downward since. The average price in 1961 was just $5/g.

For anyone who thinks the government agency's numbers, particularly the prices, seem a little off, StatsCan warns that results published on the hub are estimates based on surveys conducted from 1961 to now. That's why they've launched a crowdsourcing tool to maintain a database of prices. Users can input the price, amount, location and purpose of the cannabis purpose, and they've also included three grades of product: low quality, medium and high. But how the quality level is defined isn't clear.

In September, the Ontario government indicated they would be setting prices in government-controlled stores around the $10/g range for dried flower products in an effort to compete with the black market. The federal government has also indicated there will be an excise tax added to medicinal cannabis to ensure prices are on-par with the recreational market.

Pore over the new data from Statistics Canada here.

In this article

Join the Conversation


  1. Maxcatski Reply

    Well, $10 a gram is NOT competitive with the black market. That's $280 an ounce. I never paid much more than $150 when I used to buy pot. So the legal pot already costs twice what the black market stuff does. And that does not include the taxes!

    Self production costs less than a dollar a gram. I may not be able to deduct my grow supplies from my income tax - but I can afford to consume a lot more cannabis. And I need that to meet my prescription values.

    Legalization efforts have come a long way - but not on taxation and pricing.

    1. Maxcatski Reply

      And I got to say that the price of weed in 1961 was nowhere near $5 a gram. Mexican ditch weed used to cost 20 bucks an ounce when I was a kid in 1969. However, we didn't smoke that stuff. We used to buy pounds of hash in Montreal for 2 bucks a gram and sell it for 3. Well, at least we would sell the half of the pound that we didn't smoke.