Even if you do manage to brave the long lineups outside the brand new legal pot shops, there's a chance the products you're looking for are out of stock.
Shortages of cannabis products are being reported across the country in the early days of legalization, and producers are having a hard time keeping up with the outsized demand.
Jordan Sinclair with Tweed Inc., an Ontario-based cannabis producer and distributor, suggests very few people, if any, predicted exactly how big the demand for legal pot would be.
"There's just more demand than I think even we anticipated," Sinclair told CJAD 800's Dave Kaufman. "And now we're just scrambling to get much more [product] out to the shelves."
The Société Québécoise du Cannabis is reporting brisk business at the brick-and-mortar pot shops that are open — 12,500 orders were processed on day one of legalization on Wednesday, and another 13,800 on Thursday.
There's comparable business being done online: 30,000 orders on day one, and another 8,500 on day two.
By Sunday, no fewer than 45 of the 68 products available on the SQDC's website were listed as out of stock. And La Presse reports some who spent anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours waiting outside the St. Hubert Blvd. SQDC store reported only a handful of products were available on the shelves, with cannabis oils and pills completely gone.
Quebec's number one legal pot supplier, Hexo Corp., told La Presse they are optimistic about being able to restock the increasingly empty shelves at SQDC outlets in the short term. They say there's plenty of merchandise in their warehouses, and they promise to increase production substantially in the coming weeks.
A spokesperson for the company admits that while the demand for their products was three times as high as they had anticipated, for now, they're not dealing with any major issues with production or distribution.
Sinclair says if there are any shortages at pot shops, they won't last forever. Things should be much smoother, he says, once the actual appetite of consumers for legal pot becomes clearer — most likely, within a few months.
A lot of this is forecasting; it's not based on any real market data," Sinclair says. "That'll be part of the refinement process."