Linton, bucktoothed, approachable, unpredictable, a father with no time for therapy or books, is an adrenalin junkie. He gets a second bottle of burgundy, and we all order cocktails while Terry talks Bruce up to our distracted waiter. This guy, Terry tells the inattentive waiter, saw a new world opening and, from suburban Ottawa, put Canada at the centre of the global weed boom — a boom, and a bust, that he fostered. It was Linton who took a cannabis brand public with the stock ticker WEED. Linton brought in institutional money and Martha Stewart, CBD soap, Snoop Dogg, sparkling cannabis lemonade, and Drake.
“This is the king!” declares Terry, and Bruce just smiles. It’s been a long time since someone called him that. Canopy lost more than $675 million in 2023, a huge improvement from the $3.3 billion it lost in 2022, but, because of how Bruce structured his company, may never be able to turn a profit.
When Linton bought Bedrocan, a medical cannabis rival that increased his market cap by 15 percent, the first thing he did was fire Cam Battley, their spokesperson. Bruce didn’t want a spokesperson. He wanted to be the spokesperson for the entire industry.
Cam Battley, a Cub Scout leader, would end up spokesperson for Aurora once Terry was forced out of that role. Cam hated and still hates Bruce, and is hated by, despised by Terry, who thinks Battley badmouthed him to his board at Aurora. Bruce and Terry call Battley a cocksucker and a company stooge. Then Terry pulls out the nuclear diss: the ass-kisser faked inhaling when he pretended to smoke weed.
Because of the stakes, the inexperience, and the money, the degree to which the business was personal, the weed executives feuded like WWE wrestlers: they called the regulators on one another, poached each other’s executives, and bad-mouthed one another like teenage girls at a slumber party.
It was all part of the intensity — the emotion, attention, and buzz — of legal marijuana, a business that would grow from a court case involving medical cannabis use to rival oil and gas as a top contributor to Canada’s annual gross domestic product. Eventually, cannabis would add $43 billion to Canada’s bottom line, at a time when many companies in other industries, from Suncor to Shopify, saw their fortunes sink.
Bruce Linton and Terry Booth made something new from something sacred. They said acquisitions equalled acceleration. They said soccer moms would drink weed. They said marijuana would be a billion-dollar industry and, for a little while, it was. Bruce turned a shuttered chocolate factory in the middle of nowhere into a marijuana Taj Mahal, with sugar-free weed chocolate, tour guides, and more than fifty rooms for growing indoor marijuana. He once gave a tour to former Toronto police chief Bill Blair, asking the straitlaced copper, “When’s the last time you saw this much weed without everyone running for the door?”
Terry wanted to beat Bruce bad. He had built a grow op outside the Edmonton Airport so big that pilots complained the reflection from his roof was so bright they couldn’t land their planes. Upon arriving in Edmonton, the first thing you smelled was Terry’s weed. It didn’t matter that Edmonton and Smiths Falls, Ontario, were the worst places to grow marijuana (cold weather, expensive electricity, not many people). They were $800 million PR stunts, and if the goal was to increase their companies’ paper value, they worked, for a time.
But time would eventually run out.
Over T-bones in the Golden Steer Steakhouse — talking loudly, finishing each other’s sentences, slamming tequila, and having fun — Linton enjoys Booth’s conversation. Both men are off the clock and jamming, settling into their memories and hopes, if not fantasies, of trying to become useful in a world in which Canadian cannabis companies with American owners are being brutalized on the stock exchanges in New York and Toronto. Indeed, Aurora has just been dropped from the S&P/TSX Composite Index. To complicate things further, psychedelics — in which both men have money — are today where pot was when they started. Mushrooms, goes the thinking in today’s weed world, are the new pot. And both men obviously know how to tell this story.
Even without booze, Terry and Bruce are champion bullshitters. At their zenith, the combined value of the men and their start-ups was over $30 billion, and they had more than six thousand employees. They had facilities from Germany to Jamaica, and all over Canada. Terry made a deal for $1 million on a napkin at Richard Branson’s private island resort. Once, at a Raptors game before Bruce Linton and Drake publicly announced their joint cannabis venture, Bruce had to tell Drake to be discreet about it, as photographs of the two men together could influence the market.
In the process, Bruce and Terry drove up the value of their companies and the entire industry, only to see the whole thing come crashing in a fiery heap to the ground, where it lies today. Eight hundred people have just been fired from Canopy. Aurora lost $28.3 million in the three months ended June 30, 2023, and their new CEO framed that number as good news. There are people in cannabis who have lost their life savings gambling on Terry and Bruce — who have been gambling with their own companies the same way.
The Canadian economy is speculative, perfect for hedge funds who would short weed stocks, betting against the very companies they’ve helped raise money for. As long as they make their commissions and sell before the suckers — Canadian retail investors — the bankers don’t care. They’re eating expense account steak on Bay Street, following the same template they perfected in the 1990s with junior mines.
What could be more speculative than the size of the first legal cannabis sales? No one had done what Bruce and Terry did. There was no blueprint. No ceiling. And, for lots of it, there were elastic rules. Health Canada was learning right alongside the companies they were regulating. Justin Trudeau, the dashing Canadian prime minister, rode into office as a breath of fresh air. Goodbye prim Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. Trudeau told Vice he had smoked pot as an MP. Justin Trudeau arrived as the Barack Obama of the North. Canada was sexy, hip; marijuana legalization signalled youth, change.
Bruce and Terry, guns blazing, were that change.
The two men now making their way through a second bottle had convinced investment bankers that it wasn’t $10 million that a Canadian producer licensed to sell marijuana needed to raise. It was $100 million. More! All Terry had to hear was that Bruce was interested in some company, some seed manufacturer, energy drink, or Dutch vault system, and he’d pay a premium on that asset, whatever it was. A $5 million company could suddenly be worth $500 million because Terry or Bruce would pay that much. Was it worth it? Fuck no. But also … difficult to determine, because the ensuing result — in an industry in which you couldn’t advertise — would be that their stock would rise. It was speculative. Marijuana companies had to buy things to get attention, to keep the bubble inflated. Until, of course, the bubble burst.
Eventually, sales would have to come. Profits. EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — became the weed world’s metric, rather than vault size or “funded capacity,” which determined a company’s value based upon how much greenhouse space it owned. Boards would eventually want to see profits. Even the boards themselves would eventually grow up. Booth and Linton wanted to be cannabis’s Zuckerberg and Bezos, and they were encouraged by Jim Cramer, Nelson Peltz, and everyone’s sister or aunt in Saskatchewan to try. They inflated the value of the legal cannabis market and forced business decisions. It got so that a cannabis executive in British Columbia couldn’t work on making their licensed producer profitable in Canada, to grow good weed and build a brand. They had to think globally.
Trevor Fencott, who sold Mettrum, his medical marijuana company with Michael Haines as CEO, to Linton for $430 million before opening a chain of cannabis retailers, says everyone in the industry had to become IBM overnight.
The Canadian cannabis industry, led by Terry and Bruce, artificially created weed companies with bad weed (which Terry refutes) and market values that were one thousand times sales (which he doesn’t). Legalization was a groundbreaking, historic end of prohibition that placed Canada (and, strangely, Uruguay) ahead of the rest of the world. It caused a rush: it stoked a market fuelled by C-level investment banks when institutional money — smart money — wouldn’t touch the sector. For everyone involved, it was intoxicating. Silicon Valley, if you swapped out computers for blunts.
In 2016, I began working in cannabis and felt a visceral attraction to the scene. I attended the marijuana Oscars — the Lift Awards, which named winners in categories like Top Indica Flower, Top High CBD Oil, and Licensed Producer of the Year — and couldn’t get a beer, but there was a room at the award show for cannabis vaping. I hadn’t seen a vape before. I was so excited I felt like I was high even before I got stoned. Eager, opportunistic, and desperate for anything, I was looking for mentors, for fun, for money, for bylines — for action — and I found it in Terry and Bruce. I took a hit of a vape pen and felt my mind explode. I can manoeuvre in this environment, amongst these people, this product, in ways other people can’t.
Inevitably, for all of us, the momentum could not be sustained: investment around the world dried up, facilities closed across the country, and thousands of jobs and billions of dollars disappeared like so many hundreds on a blackjack table.
Over the course of the evening’s vodka, two bottles of red, and shots of tequila at the Golden Steer, Terry Booth and Bruce Linton recount the birth of a Canadian moment: when entrepreneurs and investors in London and Los Angeles had to travel to Edmonton and Smiths Falls to get into the Wild West Canadian sector that banks in America still can’t touch. They name names, pick winners and losers, and explain how they came to have a deep affection, a sincere appreciation, for a flower that people have rolled up to feel better since the beginning of time.
Outside the restaurant, Booth has a Rolls-Royce waiting, and when the bottle is dry, we hop in the car. We drop Linton off at the Marriott across the street from the cannabis convention. In Las Vegas, in marijuana, where even junior executives compete to flaunt money, Linton takes the opposite approach: he eats bagels from a strip mall and the only reservation he wanted was at the Golden Steer.
Booth, however, is good for a nightcap — he’s still a year away from getting sober — and we walk through his hotel, the Wynn, find a bar for more vodka, and take an edible produced by a young hustler. The kid has a company, he tells Booth, that is going to be big. Terry gives him his number. He tells me, “Ya never know.”
This is the story of Terry Booth and Bruce Linton and all the activists, entrepreneurs, and hardworking people who saw an opportunity in marijuana and competed, as Hexo founder Sébastien St-Louis likes to say, like cage fighters: to win.
Earlier in the evening, Linton had a chance to respond to Terry’s “Look at what we did, man” comment. Bruce thought about it as he finished his drink, then smiled.
He said, “We changed the world.”
Twin Towers: Bruce Linton (right) and Terry Booth at the Golden Steer Steakhouse in Las Vegas. Booth, coming down off an edible, had a Rolls-Royce parked outside.
Part I Risk
Chapter 1 Patient Zero
“Everyone should have access to marijuana.”
Terry Parker
This story begins with a sick man in a poor part of town, smoking weed.
Terrance Parker was smoking marijuana in his fourth-floor apartment in Parkdale, a gritty neighbourhood of Toronto, when he heard a bang on his door. Parker, thirty-nine at the time, in the summer of 1996, was already a veteran of Canada’s drug war. He was dazed and confused when the police arrived, but he wasn’t exactly stoned. Parker doesn’t use weed for a buzz. Rather, he uses it to control his buzz, to escape it. He’s suffered from violent epileptic seizures all his life and, since he was sixteen, has used cannabis medicinally.
In 1987, when he was thirty, after a bust for simple cannabis possession, Parker was acquitted on the grounds of “medical necessity.” This created a cannabis grey zone and a regulatory nightmare: it was a medical necessity that Terry Parker smoked weed, but how was he supposed to get it? Parker used cannabis to control his otherwise uncontrollable fits. Pot makes the volcano not explode. But there was danger in the marijuana underworld. Hippies, sure. But also criminals. He’d been robbed. Been sold fake weed. Made himself vulnerable.
In the summer of 1996, Parker would become the only person in Canada with paperwork saying he could legally smoke pot. This was the result of numerous court cases fought by Aaron Harnett, Parker’s long-time pro bono counsel. In court, Harnett, only a few years out of law school, was prepared, emotional, a bit gonzo, and all in. Like a lot of people who went into law to change the system, there was no doubt this stuff was personal to him. Even today, he tears up when discussing the cause: the activists at the time — all of them smoked marijuana — believed legalization was a cross to die on, an indelible charter of rights that tied into freedom, health, and an almost religious ideal for how the world should be. The plant was sacred, society needed to change, and people were willing, at the time, to go to jail — not for banking irregularities, but for their beliefs.
Terry Parker, Harnett says, was not scared of jail. With his condition, he’d been imprisoned all his life. Outside of court, Aaron Harnett appeared before the cameras, bearded and with curly red hair, looking like Woody Harrelson as Larry Flint, strumming his guitar and espousing the virtues of marijuana. He barely turned a profit at his small law firm, where he worked cases he believed in for free. Harnett, a long-time smoker, was a marijuana guy.