Canada is only hours away from starting legal recreational marijuana sales and ironically, a majority of Canadians are not interested in smoking the drug.
A survey from Nanos Research for CTV News has found that 71 per cent of the participants polled were not interested in smoking marijuana once it’s legal in the country.
Another 8 per cent said they were somewhat not interested while 11 per cent said they were somewhat interested.
Eight per cent said they were interested in smoking marijuana upon legalization while two percent of those surveyed were unsure.
According to Nik Nanos, the pollster, the survey results show the smoking culture of the country.
He said to CTVNews.ca, “Governments have spent decades demonizing smoking, and even though they’ve legalized something and allowed for smoking marijuana I don’t think that means that there’s going to be a new renaissance in how people feel about smoking in general.”
“I consider this a benchmark of the old Canada, with a new Canada starting this week. One that has the consumption of marijuana,” he said.
“We should be looking at what the trend is over time because as the consumption of marijuana and cannabis becomes legalized and normalized, it’ll be interesting to see whether over time people feel a little more open to experimenting and trying cannabis and marijuana.”
“In British Columbia there tends to be more of an attitude of acceptability related to the smoking of marijuana. At least in Quebec it could quite very well be for Quebecers the reason that there’s not an interest is that culturally they’re probably more into traditional consumption of alcohol and wine,” Nanos further said.