Die Nachfrage nach Cannabis in Kanada fiel nach der Legalisierung

Legalizing recreational cannabis was widely expected to make the drug more attractive. Legal stores would reduce purchasing friction, product selection would expand, and the stigma surrounding cannabis use would gradually weaken. Together, these changes appeared likely to increase not only consumption but also the value consumers placed on cannabis.

A new Canadian study¹ suggests that the opposite may have occurred. Researchers followed community adults for more than six years after recreational cannabis became legal in Oktober 2018. Although participants did not significantly reduce how frequently they used cannabis, their willingness to consume, purchase, and pay higher prices for it declined.

The distinction matters. Legalization may not have caused Canadians to abandon cannabis, but it also does not appear to have intensified its hold on existing consumers. Instead, cannabis may have become a more ordinary product, used with relatively stable frequency but carrying less novelty, urgency, and economic importance.

Measuring Cannabis Demand Rather Than Use Alone

Most assessments of cannabis legalization focus on whether consumption increased or decreased. That is useful, but frequency cannot explain how strongly someone values cannabis or how difficult it would be for that person to reduce consumption.

Someone who uses cannabis twice per week because it is inexpensive and readily available is not necessarily equivalent to someone who organizes spending around maintaining the same schedule. Their frequency may be identical, but the drug holds a different motivational value for each person.

To investigate this distinction, researchers used a behavioural economic measure known as the ‘Marijuana Purchase Task’. Participants estimated how much cannabis flower they would consume during a typical week at prices ranging from free to $60 per gram.

The exercise produced several measures of cannabis demand:

• Consumption when cannabis was free
• Maximum intended spending on cannabis
• The price at which consumption would stop
• Sensitivity to progressively higher prices

Researchers also examined reported monthly cannabis spending. Together, these measures provided a broader picture of cannabis’s reinforcing value, meaning how rewarding and motivationally important it was to participants.

What Six Years of Canadian Data Revealed

The study began shortly before recreational legalization and continued through April 2025. The analytical sample included 1,103 adults who reported cannabis use during at least one assessment wave. Participants completed as many as 14 relevant assessments, and median retention was approximately 87 percent.

Contrary to the researchers’ original hypothesis, every cannabis-demand measure declined significantly over time. Participants became less willing to consume large amounts when cannabis was free, spend heavily on it, or continue purchasing it as prices increased. Actual monthly expenditure also fell.

Average reported spending declined from C$36.20 per month at baseline to C$24.23 at the final assessment. Cannabis-use frequency showed a small increase, but it was not statistically significant.

This creates the study’s most important finding: cannabis use and cannabis demand followed different trajectories. Consumption remained relatively stable while the product’s motivational and economic pull weakened.

Frequent Consumers Experienced the Largest Declines

The overall result concealed meaningful differences between groups. Participants who already used cannabis before legalization generally experienced declining demand, with the steepest reductions often appearing among the most frequent consumers.

Those who had used cannabis at least four times per week before legalization showed especially pronounced declines in desired consumption, maximum expenditure, and the price they were willing to tolerate. Their reported monthly spending also declined more rapidly than it did among less frequent consumers.

Participants who had not recently used cannabis before legalization followed a different pattern. Their demand remained stable or increased, depending on the measure. That result requires careful interpretation because their initial demand was already at or near zero. They had little opportunity to decline and substantially more room to increase.

Regression toward the average may partly explain why heavy users declined while nonusers increased. Nevertheless, the findings do not support the idea that legalization intensified demand among those who were already the most involved with cannabis.

Men experienced steeper declines than women in consumption when cannabis was free, maximum intended expenditure, and tolerated price. The study found no significant evidence that demand trajectories differed by age.

Legalization May Have Removed Cannabis’s Scarcity Premium

One possible explanation is that legalization removed a psychological scarcity premium. Before legalization, purchasing cannabis could involve uncertain availability, inconsistent supply, legal risk, or reliance on a limited number of sellers. These constraints could encourage consumers to buy more when cannabis was available or tolerate prices they would otherwise reject.

A regulated market changes that calculation. Consumers know that licensed products will probably remain available tomorrow. They can compare stores, brands, formats, potency levels, and prices. The need to secure cannabis while an opportunity exists becomes less important.

Legalization may also reduce novelty. A product can lose some of its motivational power when it moves from a prohibited activity into conventional retail. Familiarity does not necessarily eliminate consumption, but it can make the purchase feel less exceptional and reduce the urgency surrounding it.

Greater price sensitivity could therefore represent a maturing consumer market rather than declining interest in cannabis altogether. Consumers may continue using cannabis while becoming more selective about what they purchase and how much they will pay.

Falling Personal Demand Can Coexist With Rising Retail Sales

The results may initially appear inconsistent with Canada’s growing cannabis industry. Recent Canadian cannabis retail sales have continued to rise, while Statistics Canada reports that annual legal sales reached C$5.5 billion during the 2024/2025 fiscal year.

However, national sales and individual demand measure different things. Legal-market revenue can increase as consumers migrate away from illicit sellers, the adult population grows, retail access improves, or occasional users enter the market. None of those developments requires established consumers to value cannabis more intensely.

Health Canada found that the share of consumers obtaining cannabis from legal sources increased from 37 percent in 2019 to 72 percent in 2024. Legal sales can therefore expand even if individual consumers become more price-conscious or reduce their monthly spending.

This distinction is important for cannabis businesses. Mature markets cannot rely indefinitely on legalization itself to sustain consumer enthusiasm. When novelty fades and buyers become more sensitive to price, producers must compete through consistency, product quality, practical formats, brand trust, and clearly differentiated experiences.

Why Usage Rates Provide an Incomplete Policy Scorecard

The findings also suggest that legalization should not be judged through consumption prevalence alone. A stable rate of use does not necessarily mean that a policy has produced no meaningful behavioural change.

Demand measures can reveal whether cannabis is becoming more dominant in household spending, more resistant to price increases, or more compelling to frequent consumers. They may also help distinguish routine use from patterns associated with greater motivational salience and potential misuse.

Other Canadian findings similarly show why individual outcomes must be separated. One recent analysis found that cannabis use increased without a corresponding rise in impaired driving. Legalization can influence purchasing, sourcing, risk perception, driving behaviour, and problematic use in different directions at the same time.

A more useful legalization scorecard would therefore combine consumption frequency with spending, dependence symptoms, product potency, impaired driving, youth access, illicit-market participation, and demand sensitivity. No single number can capture the entire policy outcome.

Important Limitations of the Cannabis Demand Study

The study cannot prove that legalization caused the decline in demand. It was observational and did not include a comparable jurisdiction where recreational cannabis remained prohibited. Cannabis demand was measured only once before legalization, so researchers could not determine whether the downward trend had already begun.

The assessment period also included the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted purchasing, social behaviour, income, and substance use. Participants were recruited from a research registry in Hamilton, Ontario, and should not be treated as a nationally representative sample.

The purchase task focused on cannabis flower. Canada’s market increasingly includes edibles, beverages, concentrates, oils, and vape products, each of which may produce different purchasing behaviour. Rising potency also complicates interpretation because consumers may require fewer grams to achieve the same effect.

These limitations prevent a simple declaration that legalization reduced cannabis motivation. They do, however, make one conclusion reasonable: six years of legal access did not produce the expected increase in demand among this cohort.

A More Nuanced Picture of Cannabis Legalization

Canada’s experience suggests that greater availability does not automatically make cannabis more motivationally powerful. For established consumers, legalization may have reduced the novelty, scarcity, and willingness to pay that once surrounded the product.

People may continue using cannabis while feeling less compelled to maximize consumption or absorb higher prices. That separation between behaviour and motivation is easy to miss when legalization is evaluated only by counting users or purchases.

The next step is to determine whether declining demand predicts fewer cannabis-related problems over time. Studies comparing provinces, product categories, and countries with different regulatory systems could also clarify whether retail density, pricing, taxation, potency rules, or public-health messaging influence the reinforcing value of cannabis.

For now, the evidence offers a counterintuitive but potentially encouraging result. Legalization expanded access and supported a large regulated market, yet cannabis did not become more economically compelling to the people who were already using it. In many cases, it appears to have lost some of its pull.

References:

¹ Coelho, S. G., Keough, M. T., & MacKillop, J. (2026). Behavioral economic cannabis demand following recreational cannabis legalization: Six-year findings from an observational cohort study of community adults in Canada. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 113335. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2026.113335