What’s touted as a one-stop shopping centre for all your marijuana needs is getting up and running at 1627 Quadra St in Victoria.
The new “high” class collection of businesses called the Canna Mall stocks everything from $10 slices of potent banana bread to pocket vapourizers and butane hash oil by the gram under carefully tended counters.
It’s possibly the first marijuana mall in North America, but definitely “the first in Canada,” said Nicole Little, operations manager for Skunk & Panda’s Shatter Shack, which showcases 60 cannabis-derived extracts for sale. Little is hopeful that the marijuana mall will give Victoria city officials some kind of assurance of a business model selling top-quality concentrated marijuana extracts tested to be free of residual heavy metals for instance.
“We have on-site security and we are not about selling to children,” Little stressed. “We’re about bringing cannabis into the open market.”
The mall promotes craft cannabis, along the lines of craft beer, she said, doing away with people needing to use drug dealers or dicey products, she said. “We’re trying to promote cannabis as part of our day to day,” she added.
Mayor Lisa Helps said in May that she was “not OK” with the Green Ceiling, which opened April 18 as the city’s first coffee house for pot, with patrons over 19 paying $5 an hour at the business. Canna Mall is located in the same complex as Green Ceiling.
As for the Canna Mall: “Council has not favoured any enforcement until the city’s regime is constructed. This type of operation is being examined now as the city’s regulatory regime is nearing completion,” said Helps.
Victoria will hold a public hearing on new marijuana dispensary regulations on Sept. 8, after which council and city staff will seek compliance with the new regime, she added.
None of the new Canna Mall businesses are licensed.
