How we live inside the Act.

The federal Cannabis Act (S.C. 2018, c. 16) and the Cannabis Regulations made under it are the central rule-set for everything cannabis-related that happens in Canada — including how cannabis is talked about online. Each province layers its own retail framework and minimum age on top.

Blazed is built around three commitments that come straight from that framework:

1. No promotion that could appeal to young persons. Section 17 of the Act forbids it, and we treat the boundary as non-negotiable across our editorial, our community guidelines, and the listing fields we accept from licensed producers.
2. Adult-only access. Cannabis content is available only to users who clear an age gate appropriate to their province or country of access (Section 4).
3. Independent, factual review.We are not a licence-holder and we're not paid by producers. Our editorial sits within the long-standing carve-out for information of a factual or scientific nature (Section 3).

Where a provincial regulator imposes stricter rules — Quebec being the obvious example — we apply the stricter rule to everyone in that jurisdiction.

The single most important thing to understand about Blazed: we are an independent review and directory service. We do not touch cannabis. We do not hold a federal cannabis licence, provincial retail authorisation, or any equivalent permit, and we are not seeking one.

We are

A community directory of Canadian licensed producers, their products, and the provincial retailers that carry them; a platform for adult users to write reviews and discover strains and terpene profiles; a publisher of plain-language cannabis education.

We are not

A seller, broker, fulfiller, courier, or marketplace for cannabis. We do not take orders. We do not handle inventory. We do not arrange shipping. Provincial retailers and licensed producers sit downstream of every link out.

We are also not

A clinician. Nothing on Blazed is medical advice. Anyone considering cannabis for a clinical reason should consult a healthcare professional and, where relevant, the medical cannabis access route administered by Health Canada.

Section 18 of the Cannabis Act sets out a narrow but real exemption from the Act's broader promotion prohibitions: communicating information of a factual or general nature about cannabis is permitted, provided it isn't paired with the forbidden practices in section 17 (testimonials, lifestyle, endorsement, appeals to young persons, and the rest).

Our editorial — the dose-and-onset primers, the terpene breakdowns, the tolerance-break guides — is written to sit firmly inside that carve-out:

• Source-cited, plainly written, and bounded to what the literature supports.
• Brand-neutral. Educational pieces don't recommend a licensed producer or product, and they don't use producer imagery as illustration.
• Reviewed before publication against a checklist that mirrors section 17's prohibitions.

Reviews and ratings posted by our community are also factual in intent — a description of a real consumer's real experience — but they pass through different controls because users are not subject to the Act's promotion regime in the same way a licence-holder is. See Section 7.

Before any cannabis content loads, Blazed asks a visitor to confirm they meet the minimum legal cannabis age for their province, territory, or country of access. The age gate is enforced on every entry point, persists for 30 days, and re-prompts when the stored region changes.

Once a user signs up, the age check is re-applied at the account level using the declared date of birth. Producer and retailer claim flows require a second adult declaration from an authorised business representative.

We accept that no age gate is bulletproof. We treat it as part of a defence-in-depth approach: the gate, plus account-level age, plus moderation policies that disallow content directed at young persons (Section 5), plus the absence of any e-commerce path on the platform.

Whether or not a particular piece of content on Blazed technically qualifies as promotionunder the Act, we apply section 17's prohibitions across the platform as a floor. We will not host content — supplied by users, producers, retailers, or anyone else — that:

• Could reasonably be appealing to young persons (mascots, cartoons, cereal-mascot iconography, branding that mimics non-cannabis youth products).
• Includes a testimonial or endorsement, however expressed, by an identifiable person, character, or animal.
• Depicts a person, character, or animal — real or fictional — in a way associated with consumption.
• Evokes a positive or negative emotion about or image of a way of life that includes glamour, recreation, excitement, vitality, risk, or daring.
• Communicates information that is false, misleading, or deceptive — including unverified medical claims.
• Offers cannabis as a prize, gift, contest entry, or other inducement.

These constraints apply to producer-supplied imagery and copy, to operator-uploaded shop assets, and to the editorial we publish ourselves. Reviews are governed by the more consumer-focused rules in Section 7.

A producer or retailer page on Blazed combines:

1. Public regulatory data — licence numbers, product registrations, and provincial retail data we pull from Health Canada, the OCS, BCLDB, the SQDC, and equivalent authorities. These are factual records and we publish them as-is.
2. Operator-supplied content — once a producer or shop claims their listing, they can supply a description, contact details, hours, and product imagery. This content is held to the section 17 limits in Section 5. Submitting non-compliant content is grounds for removal and revocation of the claim.
3. Community signal — independent reviews, ratings, and lists by signed-in adult users.

Operators retain editorial control over their own description and imagery, but they don't control reviews, ratings, or community lists, and they cannot pay for placement. We do not run a sponsored-listing programme, and we won't.

Producers and retailers with claims on Blazed agree to a separate Listing Operator Agreement that mirrors the obligations in this section. A copy is available on request from listings@getblazed.ca.

Independent consumer reviews are the spine of Blazed. The Act does not bar an adult Canadian from writing about their own experience with cannabis — and we believe a real, source-cited review culture is good for public health and for the legal industry. We do moderate, and we publish what we're looking for:

• First-person and factual. Reviews describe what the reviewer experienced. Marketing copy disguised as a review gets removed.
• No youth appeal.Reviews can't target, sexualise, or otherwise appeal to anyone under the provincial minimum age.
• No unverified medical claims. A reviewer can describe how a product made them feel; they cannot claim it cures, treats, or prevents a disease.
• No paid or swapped reviews. Undisclosed sponsorship, review-swap arrangements, and brigading are grounds for removal and account termination. We treat these as Competition Act and FTC issues as much as cannabis ones.
• No identity attacks. Disagreeing with a producer is fine; harassing the people who work there is not.

Reviews are screened by automated heuristics on submission and a human moderation queue on flag. Producers can flag a review they believe violates these rules; we don't remove on their word alone, and we'll always tell a reviewer why a piece of theirs came down.

We carry Health Canada's framing on the risks of cannabis use and we cite the underlying evidence rather than restating it as opinion. Specifically:

• Strain pages link to neutral pharmacology rather than therapeutic claims.
• Dose-and-onset content prominently flags impairment, tolerance, dependence, and the contraindications that the current evidence supports.
• Every page of the Service carries a “Please don't drive high” footer reminder and the 19+ marker — see Section 5 on emotive imagery, which constrains how that messaging looks.
• We do not minimise harm to pregnant or breastfeeding individuals, adolescents, or anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis.

Blazed is built for the Canadian legal market. We accept that a meaningful share of our readers are in the United States and elsewhere, and we serve them honest information — within the limits of each jurisdiction's law.

For visitors from the U.S.:

• Cannabis remains a federal Schedule I controlled substance under the U.S. Controlled Substances Act, regardless of state law. Nothing on Blazed is an offer, solicitation, or facilitation of a cannabis sale to a U.S. resident.
• We do not direct producer or retailer purchase links to U.S. residents, and the licensed producers and provincial retailers we list cannot ship to U.S. addresses.
• Our editorial is informational and protected by the First Amendment's safeguards for truthful commercial and non-commercial speech. None of it is medical advice.
• The age threshold we apply to U.S. visitors is the higher of 21 (the federal alcohol benchmark adopted by every U.S. state for recreational cannabis where legal) or the local statutory minimum.

Visitors outside Canada and the U.S. should be aware that cannabis law varies widely. You are responsible for confirming that using Blazed is lawful where you are.

We want to know — before a regulator does — if something on Blazed crosses a Cannabis Act line. Two routes:

To us

compliance@getblazed.ca. We acknowledge within two business days, investigate, and close the loop with the reporter. Producer-related reports are handled by a different reviewer than the one who onboarded the listing.

To Health Canada

Concerns about a licensed producer or any non-compliant promotion can be filed directly with Health Canada's Cannabis Compliance and Enforcement Branch at canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-medication/cannabis/laws-regulations. We do not require you to come to us first.

For matters that involve user content rather than producer content — harassment, deceptive reviews, account abuse — the acceptable-use section of the Terms of Service is the right starting point.

Cannabis regulation in Canada and abroad is still moving. Statutory amendments, provincial reorganisations, and Health Canada guidance updates all change how this page should read. We track that work and update this document accordingly.

When a material change lands — a new prohibition, a new regulatory requirement, a meaningful change in how we enforce one — we'll surface the change in the product and update the “Last updated” stamp. The current version always lives at /legal/cannabis-act; archived versions are available on request from compliance@getblazed.ca.