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For marijuana retailers, it’s no secret: Customers like buying weed close to home, if they can. New research into Canada’s regulated cannabis market supports that intuition: Consumer proximity to government-regulated stores increases the odds that people will source product from the legal market.

The paper – due to be published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs – explores the association between how far Canadian cannabis users live from regulated cannabis retail stores and how they choose to obtain marijuana products.

Perhaps most relevant to the cannabis industry, the research found that respondents who lived less than 3 kilometers (roughly 1.9 miles) from the closest regulated marijuana retailer were more likely to source cannabis from a legal store and less likely to get it from a regulated website (one of the other ways survey respondents could report obtaining cannabis).

“What we took from that is that perhaps there is a diminishing effect after a while,” said Elle Wadsworth, a senior analyst with Rand Europe who was the paper’s lead researcher in her previous role as a postdoctoral student with the University of Waterloo and the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction.

“There’s so many stores – but unless they’re very, very close, perhaps the amount of stores has that diminishing effect. As long as there’s one store very close to you, that potentially may bring you into the legal market.”

The research underscores the value of convenience among Canadian cannabis users, said Michael Armstrong, an associate business professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, who studies Canada’s regulated cannabis market and was uninvolved in Wadsworth’s research.

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