In the recent past, buying weed meant meeting a friend of a friend in the back-parking lot of a supermarket only to be left waiting for hours, hoping your herbs would arrive. But now things are changing with the option to buy publicly traded, NASDAQ stock of a multi-billion-dollar Canadian pot conglomerate. Tilray and Aphria, two of Canada’s largest cannabis companies are set to create the worlds largest cannabis corporation with a combined estimated market value of 3.9 billion dollars and have intentions of finding their space in the ever-growing U.S cannabis market.
Both companies have already started their moves into the largest global cannabis market independently of each other. Manitoba Harvest, a Tilray powered CBD company is already offering products in the United States and Aphria recently purchased a southern based craft beer company, SweetWater Brewing, for the price of $300 million dollars. The purchase of the beer company likely will serve as a base for a transition into cannabis sales in the United States.
Tilray CEO Brendan Kennedy is hopeful for the future of legal cannabis and believes it soon will be traded both Statewide and internationally. He thinks that by 2022 people can expect cannabis to be traded like alcohol and that the state specific brands and markets will soon be a thing of the past. For the time being cannabis remains federally illegal in the U.S and it appears it will remain that way for the immediate future under the incoming Biden white house. Although Biden leans towards decriminalization he has not made it explicitly clear that he has any intentions of heading towards federal legalization. A lot is left to be seen for the future of mega cannabis conglomerations and how they are to fair in an ever opening, yet restricted marketplace.
