On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved an ordinance allowing cannabis cafés. Licensed retailers there will be able to serve food and non-alcoholic drinks alongside cannabis for on-site consumption, and host live entertainment while they do it. San Francisco is the first Bay Area city to give final approval under a 2024 California state law that lets municipalities opt in, and the ordinance now sits on the mayor’s desk awaiting signature.
Board President Rafael Mandelman, who wrote the ordinance, called it “a real tool” to help the city’s legal retailers “compete and grow.” He went further: “Cannabis cafés are part of this city’s recovery, right alongside our entertainment zones, neighbourhood activation, and free concerts, and today’s vote makes sure our legal retailers aren’t left behind.”
Read that second quote again. A city politician just tied cannabis hospitality directly to the health of his main streets. On the record, on purpose.
Now here’s the part that should sting a little. Cannabis is still federally illegal in the United States. It has been fully legal in Canada since October 2018, and yet I, a licensed cannabis retailer in Toronto, cannot legally offer a customer a chair.
I watch this play out at my counter every week. Someone buys a perfectly legal product and asks the same question: “Is there anywhere around here to actually enjoy this?”
The answer is no.
Not a lounge, because those don’t exist. Not a café, because there is no license for one. For a lot of my customers, and for nearly every tourist who walks through my door, the only realistic place to consume the legal product they just bought is a sidewalk.
Canada built one of the most mature legal cannabis markets in the world and forgot to build anywhere to be a customer in it.
What makes this stranger is that Ontario already knows how to do this. We license on-site consumption of an intoxicant at the point of production and sale every day. Brewery taprooms pour by the glass. Winery tasting rooms are the backbone of Niagara tourism. Distilleries run tasting bars.
Nobody calls any of that a public health emergency. We call it a Saturday.
Cannabis is the only legal intoxicant in this province denied a hospitality layer, and that is a policy choice, not a safety conclusion. There is currently no consumption license class in Ontario, and no process underway to create one.
So what would the Ontario version even look like? Let’s clear one thing up first, because it derails every conversation about this: nobody serious is talking about smoking lounges, picture the modest version instead. A licensed retailer with trained, certified staff. An ingestible-first menu, meaning beverages and edibles, the same products already sold legally in every dispensary in the province. Informed consent at the door, run as a pilot, collect the data, and see what happens. That’s the whole radical idea: it’s a café.
And the case for it isn’t really a cannabis case at all. It’s a main street case, the same one Mandelman made. Cannabis retail as currently designed is purely transactional. A customer is in and out of my store in about four minutes, and then the street loses them. A consumption layer creates dwell time, and dwell time is what commercial strips actually run on. The customer who stays for an hour buys a coffee next door, browses the record shop, books the dinner reservation, and comes back next week. San Francisco understands that its legal cannabis retailers are an asset to neighbourhood recovery. Ontario still treats its retailers like something to be contained.
San Francisco looked at its struggling downtown and decided its legal retailers shouldn’t be left behind. Ontario hasn’t decided anything, and after eight years, not deciding is a decision too. The customers are already here and the products are already legal. The regulatory playbook exists two doors down at the brewery, all that’s missing is a place to sit.
Legal to buy, nowhere to be. It doesn’t have to stay that way.