When the possibility of legalizing cannabis use appeared on the public\u2019s radar seven years ago, Michael Armstrong\u2019s curiosity was piqued.<\/p>\n
The Brock Associate Professor of Operations Research had many questions: Who would sell the product? How would it be marketed? How would legal cannabis impact the illicit market?<\/p>\n
Armstrong began looking at these issues from a business operations perspective. The cannabis industry wasn\u2019t specifically his area of expertise back then.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a business professor, I was following what the government was saying about policy goals and the rules they wanted to put in place,\u201d he says. \u201cI thought that some of those rules would be effective, but some of them just didn\u2019t make sense for the goals the government wanted to reach.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, I wrote an op-ed on the topic, just for fun,\u201d Armstrong recalls.<\/p>\n
Little did Armstrong know that what he thought was a \u201cjust for fun, one-off\u201d \u2013 his opinion piece published in The Globe and Mail<\/em><\/a> on Aug. 17, 2016 \u2013 would open the floodgates of media engagement that continues to this day.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter my opinion piece ran, reporters started calling me for interviews for their stories,\u201d he says. \u201cI was doing lots of media interviews because I was almost the only business professor talking about the cannabis industry.\u201d<\/p>\n And the reporters kept calling. Armstrong estimates he has done more than 480 print and radio interviews with local, national and international media during his career. Three-quarters of these interviews were about cannabis legalization, he says.<\/p>\n As he interacted with media outlets, Armstrong\u2019s interest in the area grew. His research expanded to investigate a range of topics including:<\/p>\n \u201cI am particularly interested in how government regulations interact with business practices to either support or undermine public policy objectives,\u201d says Armstrong. \u201cThis business research overlaps the fields of drug policy and health economics.\u201d<\/p>\n But Armstrong didn\u2019t just publish research papers. He says his media experiences \u2014 and his first cannabis Globe and Mail<\/em> article \u2014 led him to reach out directly to the public regarding the business aspects of cannabis legalization.<\/p>\n \u201cI have written 59 columns for newspapers and online news sites, some of which I later extended into longer articles for The Conversation<\/em>,\u201d he says. \u201cI wrote another 35 columns specific to The Conversation<\/em><\/a> on cannabis and other topics. Altogether, my work on that site has attracted more than 850,000 total page views.\u201d<\/p>\n\n