With legalization now only months away from becoming the law of the land, Statistics Canada is starting to get a better idea of just how much weed Canadians are smoking.According to numbers released on Wednesday, 14 percent of Canadians (or around 4.2 million people) reported using cannabis in the past three months, with 56 percent of them being “daily” or “weekly” users. (That’s around 2.4 million people.)That figure is higher than the government’s previous best guesses when it came to cannabis use. A study released in February 2018 estimated that 12.3 per cent of Canadians had reported using cannabis over the course of 2015.Wednesday’s Statistics Canada report indicates that Canadians have in fact been smoking more weed than the government has been able to track. Wednesday’s numbers are the first being released from the new National Cannabis Survey, an attempt to provide more timely and accurate data on Canadians’ cannabis use.Rates of use varied across the provinces. At the low end of the spectrum was Quebec, where only 10 percent of people used cannabis; topping the list was Nova Scotia, where that number was 20 percent.The report also asked people what form of cannabis they used. On this question, it appears that Canadians still respect the classics: 76 percent of users said they used plain old dried weed, while 28 percent said they used edibles. Newfangled products like oil cartridges, vape pens, and liquids were only used by around 10 percent of cannabis consumers.Visit VICE News to read more.
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