OTTAWA, Jan. 25 (Xinhua) -- Almost five million Canadians spent a total of 5.7 billion Canadian dollars (some 4.6 billion U.S. dollars) on consuming marijuana in 2017, an average of about 1,200 Canadian dollars each, Statistics Canada said in a report on Thursday.
The figure is one of the main takeaways of the report that attempts to quantify the size of the market leading up to legalization this summer.
Some 90 percent of the 5.7 billion Canadian dollars on marijuana last year were for illegal, non-medical purposes, and a number of assumptions, models and sparse data sources related to the production of the mostly illegal cannabis industry, the report said.
It also estimated that Canadians imported about 300 million Canadian dollars (roughly 240 billion U.S. dollars) worth of illegal marijuana last year while Canada exported 1.2 billion Canadian dollars worth of illegal cannabis last year, Statistics Canada revealed.
Statistics Canada back-dated its data to 1961 and calculated that the price of marijuana has, on average, increased by about 3.3 percent each year. The price of marijuana was 7.5 Canadian dollars (six U.S. dollars) a gram last year.
