This is the great indoors, the place where you can stand at the end of a long metal table, stare straight ahead to its opposite end some 75 metres away and you will be lost in a mighty greenness.
You will see thousands of familiar jagged-edged leaves reaching up to the lights inside Alberta’s largest grow-op. Seconds later, your mind taps into a stash of marijuana gag lines, from this facility being a “joint venture” to “your staff room must be well-stocked with Doritos.”
Chris Mayerson smiles politely at such witticisms. They are unavoidable the moment people find out what he does for a living; that he is the chief cultivator for Aurora Cannabis Inc., a publicly traded company that has Health Canada’s approval to grow and sell marijuana for medicinal purposes. It’s a job Mr. Mayerson takes seriously, knowing that his handiwork is assisting those who benefit from the drug’s pain-numbing qualities.
Aurora, named to instill a sense of nature, was the first Alberta producer to receive a federal licence and, along with that, a set of defined rules on everything from how much dried marijuana can be produced during the length of the licence and how much can be sold.