Navigating the regulatory landscape: unveiling the factors impacting private cannabis retailers in Canada from a public health perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The legalization of cannabis in Canada has significantly reshaped the regulatory and retail landscape, presenting both challenges and opportunities for private cannabis retailers. For these retailers, a key challenge lies in balancing retailer profitability with the public health priorities outlined in the Cannabis Act, which emphasizes protecting public health and safety. This tension is particularly pronounced for business owners and operators who must navigate complex regulations while maintaining financial viability. This thesis helps to address this challenge by exploring the factors influencing private cannabis retailers through the Comprehensive Cannabis Retail Framework (CCRF), a novel analytical model I developed that integrates public health principles with retail institutional change theories. Understanding these factors is crucial for fostering a retail environment that supports business viability while advancing public health objectives, such as promoting responsible consumption, minimizing harm, and displacing the unlicensed market. Methods: This dissertation employed a mixed-methods approach across three interconnected studies, each contributing to developing and applying the CCRF. The first study involved a quantitative content analysis of Canadian news media published from January 2017 to March 2022 to identify the barriers faced by private cannabis retailers in Canada. Building on these findings, the second study applied Entman's framing theory to analyze how the media framed these barriers. The third study included qualitative interviews with nine licensed and nine prospective cannabis retailers in Newfoundland and Labrador, exploring the challenges and opportunities they experienced. Insights from each study informed the iterative refinement of the CCRF, which served as both a conceptual foundation and an analytical tool throughout the research. Results: The studies revealed several key factors influencing Canada's cannabis retail market, including government regulations, supply chain issues, economic challenges, socio-cultural factors, and competition from the unlicensed market. Government regulations emerged as the most significant factor. Media coverage frequently attributed these challenges to regulatory burdens and the unlicensed market. Interviews with licensed retailers highlighted challenges like pricing and advertising restrictions, high taxes, and logistical issues, while facilitating factors included product quality and mentorship. Prospective retailers' barriers to entry included high licensing fees, licensing inequity, stigma, and lack of financing. Conclusion and Implications: This research underscores the need for regulatory reform to ensure cannabis retailers sustainability while advancing public health objectives. The CCRF offers a comprehensive framework for understanding the interaction between regulations, retail environments, and public health. These findings provide valuable insights for not only Canada's evolving legal cannabis market but also for other markets around the world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".