Year 1 of legal cannabis a dress rehearsal for what comes next

As Canadians mark one year since the legalization of recreational cannabis,industry experts say more significantchanges are coming down the pipe.

Wearing a hat emblazoned with a large marijuana leaf and the word 'dope' in downtown Ottawa Wednesday,Billy Ladouceur has never hidden his enthusiasm for weed.

Still, he said he's glad for the legalization which kicked in on Oct. 17, 2018.

"Instead of sitting behind a tree to smoke a joint, now we'll sit in front of a tree to smoke a joint," he said.

There is also criticism regulated, legal supply in Ottawa has sometimes been inconsistent in both quantity and quality.

"The quality, Ifind, it's not good,"said CrystalCurnock.

"It's old, it's been packaged, it's dry, when you bust it upit'sjust powder."

Butexperts who work in the marijuana industry say the preceding 365 days have really been just a dress rehearsal.

Beginning today, processors will start seeking Health Canada approval for a whole new range of pot-infusededible, topical and vapeproducts that will change how Canadians consume cannabis.

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Jay Rosenthal is the president and co-founder of a marijuana news and analysis group called Business of Cannabis.

"The industry and all levels of government have had a challenging time understanding how to go from 0 to 100 really, really quickly," he said, summarizing year one.

He saidthe past year has shown that Canadians have a "fairly ravenous" appetite for cannabis andwant more pot options than they've had.

Wrench thrown into vaping hype

Processors can nownotify Health Canada of plans to bring a second wave of products to market.

Sixty days after that notification, and pending approval,the cannabis companies are permitted to ship new products to their distributors.

So, technically, a new wave of pot products will be on shelves by Dec. 17but realistically speaking, it's likely that licensing amendments, packaging, labelling and shipping details for a whole host of new products will need to be ironed out with the federal regulator.

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Most of the industry excitement is around beverages infused with cannabisand vapes, says Trina Fraser, an Ottawa-basedlawyer who has become an expert on the business side of pot.

"I think it has been successful," she said, summarizing the past year.

"The public-at-large has kind of acknowledged that the sky didn't fall, and a year later society hasn't decayed. We're not living in a fog of cannabis smoke," she joked.

She called recent concerns over lung infections connected to vaping an "interesting wrench" thrown into industry predictions about the likely popularity of marijuana vaping.