'Woody Harrelson spent a week hanging out in the space, smoking weed and playing chess. Bill Murray and Tricky dropped by'
When Abi Roach opened Kensington Market’s iconic HotBox Shop and Lounge back in 2000, the city had a radically different relationship with the cannabis industry. Roach ran the HotBox—which later became Toronto’s first cannabis consumption lounge—through a shifting legal landscape for two decades, until she finally sold the store in 2020. Last week, the HotBox’s new owners announced that the institution would be closing up shop on October 1.
In the beginning, the thought of expanding the shop into a consumption lounge never crossed my mind. Then, in 2003, I went to Vancouver and stopped by what’s now known as the New Amsterdam Cafe, the very first cannabis lounge in Canada, which opened in 1998. And then I visited Jamaica—a whole island where it was perfectly normal to buy and smoke weed, where nobody batted an eye if you lit up a spliff. Both of those experiences made a mark on me.
My philosophy has always been that, if you step an inch over the line, the line will move with you, but if you step two feet over the line, you’ve gone too far and you’re in trouble. A lot of the work that I did through the HotBox and through my advocacy nudged that line further and further and helped us get to where we are now.
Toward the end of my time with the HotBox, in the late 2010s, the gentrification of Kensington intensified: there were $4-million houses and fancy stores coming in. People couldn’t afford to live there, and we could barely afford to do business there, which is when things became really difficult. I was forced to move: I now live in what I call “the suburbs,” a few blocks away on the other side of Spadina. On the weekends, tourists started to come in from out of town and gawk at us.
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