Canada is emerging as an early global leader in the high-growth cannabis industry.

Medical cannabis has been legal in the country of 30 million since 2001. Then, in 2014, Canada implemented sweeping regulatory changes that set the stage for its young cannabis industry to prosper. Since then, the industry has been booming. Sales topped $1 billion in 2016.

Today, Canada's high-growth cannabis industry is about to get another huge boost. Canada just announced plans to legalize recreational cannabis by July of 2018. That would make Canada the first developed country in the world to legalize both medical and recreational cannabis.

Cannabis is one of the fastest growing industries in the United States, and thanks to people like John-Paul Maxfield, it’s also rapidly becoming one of the most forward thinking – and (with any luck) trendsetting.

Though cannabis and its consumption can be a contentious topic, particularly between the U.S. Congress and the sitting attorney general, it is not terribly controversial to note that marijuana and its consumption has gotten much, much more mainstream.

As of the most recent surveys, 60 percent of Americans support marijuana legalization. And that support’s breakdown by age cohort might surprise you some.

Major Canadian employers are considering covering the drug, says an industry insider.

The winds of change are blowing through employee benefit plans across Canada, and they smell like weed.

Benefits industry insider Mike Sullivan caught a whiff at a recent meeting with some of his clients, who represent private companies with benefit plans that cover about three million Canadian workers across a range of industries.

"This group that was in attendance, the No. 1 topic of discussion was medical cannabis," said Sullivan, who is president of Cubic Health, which provides analytics to employers who sponsor health benefit plans.

Vancouver-headquartered Tantalus Labs has become B.C.’s 10th Health Canada-licensed medical marijuana producer, aiming to start sales sometime in the summer of 2018 under the Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes regulations.

In an interview Monday, CEO Dan Sutton said Tantalus received word Friday that it was approved, which allows it to start acquiring materials and planting seed crops, including clone plants, at its high-tech greenhouse facility in Maple Ridge, which has the capacity to grow up to 10,000 kilograms of cannabis per year.

Jeanine Moss never expected to get into the cannabis industry. But that was before her hip-replacement surgery.

Moss, 62, of Marina Del Ray, California, had quit her job as a marketing consultant before she had her hip done in 2014. As she left the hospital, her doctors handed her a “shopping bag filled with opiates,” she said. The drugs made her disoriented and woozy.

So she switched to medical marijuana, which is legal in California and was familiar to her, having grown up in the nearby Venice section of Los Angeles. Within a week, she had tossed away her pharmaceuticals.

Canada plans to legalize recreational cannabis before July 1, 2018, and the industry continues to steal headlines as this has created great opportunity for both companies and investors.

Although the opportunity is significant, the process of becoming a licensed medical cannabis producer is very lengthy and expensive. These factors have resulted in the country having a supply and demand issue for the medical cannabis market.

Even attendees at Canada’s biggest cannabis trade show, Lift, on this weekend at Metro Convention Centre, had mixed feelings about legalization, with some worried government control and corporatization would crush the little guy.

Longtime head shop owner Luke Reynolds sees recreational marijuana in Canada eventually rolling out “like Tim Hortons and Starbucks” on every corner.

“It will be government run and I think they’re going to crush all the little guys like us who started this movement in the first place,” said Reynolds, owner of PipeDreamz in Ajax, while selling his vaporizers and pipes for pot smokers at Lift, Canada’s biggest cannabis convention, Saturday in Toronto.

The Cann Group has been given a permit by the Office of Drug Control to grow medicinal cannabis at a secret location in Melbourne.

The company, which listed on the ASX earlier this month after raising $13.5 million, has been issued permits for one medicinal cannabis permit and two cannabis research permits.

The first plants are expected to be harvested by early August.

A short time ago, Cann shares were down 4.4% to $0.535.

Harvested material from the plants is being supplied under a commercial agreement, the terms of which, including manufacturer details, volume, and price, will be kept confidential.

Considering how unpopular marijuana was with the public during the mid-1990s, it's phenomenal to take a step back and witness just how rapidly pot's presence has grown in the United States over the past 21 years.

Marveling marijuana's expansion

In 1996, California became the first state to legalize the use of medical cannabis for compassionate use. Since California, 27 additional states and Washington, D.C., have followed. Five new states legalized medical weed last year alone, including Pennsylvania and Ohio, which chose to do so entirely through the legislative process.