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The legal market for cannabis in Canada continues to overtake the illegal market. This gap between legal and illicit cannabis continues to grow, according to data from Statistics Canada. The use of household spending on adult use of cannabis products via regulated channels grew to 918 million Canadian dollars. This amount is equivalent to 800 million US dollars in the final quarter of 2020. This growth also translates to 204 million Canadian dollars, CA$204, more than the estimated amount of money spent on illegal cannabis in the same time period.
Overall spending on legal recreational cannabis overtook that of illegal transactions for the first time in the third quarter of last year. Legal spending on cannabis was 59 million Canadian dollars greater than that of illegal sales. This beneficial change in the legal market resulted from increasing retail options to buy cannabis in 2020. The Toronto area in particular, which leads Canadian cities in the sales of cannabis, experienced significant growth in the number of stores which sold cannabis. Toronto began 2020 with seven regulated retail stores and increased to 87 stores by the end of the year. This increase helped to boost sales from 17 million Canadian dollars in January 2020, to 40 million Canadian dollars in December 2020. Regulated sales of cannabis were also helped by a larger selection of cannabis products, which had consistent inventories.
In particular, sales of CBD concentrates and extracts tripled between the beginning and end of 2020. This increase amounted to CA$324 million in retail sales. Last year was also the first full year for the sale of cannabis vaporizers. This was also true for recreational cannabis edibles, in their first year of having been offered for sale, as well. The sale of edibles grew from CA$12.7 million in the first quarter of last year, to CA$42.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2020.
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