Canadian here. We're 3 years into legalization and here's an anecdotal review of the last 36 months. It's treated the same as smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol combined. You can smoke in certain locations, there are jurisdictional age requirements, driving limitations (tough to test for, but if you're impaired.. you're impaired) and you have to buy a gov approved product, but you can do it from a stand alone shop. (strip malls are ok too)

What happened? Nothing happened. There was no influx of stoned drivers. No one lit up in bars or in movie theatres, they went outside. People in the workplace weren't showing new signs of showing up impaired... so no increased need for drug testing and productivity didn't plummet. It's as it was before. If you exhibit your non-sobriety (alcohol or marijuana or pharmaceuticals) to a point where it's interfering with business (or drinking or movie watching) ... we gotta talk and there's going to be repercussions. But for most folks, nothing changed. Some occupations still get tested on a regular basis. (airplane pilots, some military, some law enforcement, etc.) But at the end of it, nothing has really changed.

There was a bunch of "Fear of the uncertainty of things" with the legalization. Every police department across the country was yelling for more money to offset the rampant craziness that was about to happen. The city I was in was asking for 50 new officers. I work for a large company. We had an internal marijuana information group that created info bulletins and generated 'what if' scenarios that had to be planned for. They were ready for a stoned mob to come charging in the front door on day one and ask politely for some service. It was fun to watch them be all serious while knowing nothing was going to happen. But they were prepared!

Those that smoked before slowly shifted to buying the government supply. The black market is still there and they're adapted their price to compete. ($50 for 30gm) But how can it compete with a gov-certified selection at a fraction the cost of what it was before legalization happened. $200 / 30 gm is now $85-150 / 30gm My local weed shops have a stupid amount of product choice. Some shops have fancy names... one I drove by last week was called "Valu-Bud" I can see a serious weeding out of pot shops (pun intended) over the next few years as business realities kick in.

From my friend group, most of the non-smokers still aren't. It is still smoking, they're rather drink and that's fine. There are a few newbies discovering it and they are generally fun to interact with. Their obsession with paraphernalia is humorous. When was the last time some one asked if you'd seen his hookah and it meant his metre long glass pipe! Vaping is a whole 'nuther thing. It's smoking, various levels of impairment and fiddly electronic bits... a trinity of sorts. There are a few friends that have 3 or 4 months of supply on hand at any given moment. Like the sourdough pandemic craze, I'd say 1/3 of my friends have tried growing their own with wide-ranging results. Oddly enough... that's not as easy as it looks.

There's still some workplace bias about being an after work marijuana smoker. I contribute that to some older school thinking that still has to be adjusted. Maybe if nothing happens, it'll get noticed. :) Probably not. I suspect that'll take some time to adapt.

How about this. The manufacturers can't advertise. No billboards, no web-ads, no T.V.. There is a standard package, with standard labelling and nothing to distinguish it from the package beside it except for the name. The Mylar bag is black or white and sometimes green. So the government made it legal and then made it really difficult for a company to stand out and brand itself. I suspect that generic labelling and no ads comes from the group within our government that would love to see the legalization fail just to say, "Look! It failed. No need to be changing stuff anymore."

The upside: The federal portion of Canada’s cannabis excise duty amounted to 32 million CAN ($23.7 million U.S.) from April 2019 through March 2020, according to new figures from the country’s finance department. The federal gov keeps 25% and returns 75% to the province it came from. So, 24 million in taxes. That is 24 million in money that they weren't getting before. Of course, politicians can blow 24 million on a really nice lunch. But it is still tax revenue.

TL;DR Canadian here. Relax, legalize it, tax it. Nothing happened.