Marijuana stocks have dominated the Toronto Stock Exchange for the last 3 years. Here are the top 10 performers.

• The Toronto Stock Exchange released a ranking of the top 30 performers over the last three years on Thursday.
• Two of the top 10 companies are cannabis companies, and two more serve the industry.
• The outperformance of the industry is not a surprise, according to the vice president of global business development for TSX. Canada legalized recreational use of cannabis in 2018.
• Read more on Markets Insider.

Pot stocks are growing like weeds on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

On Thursday, the exchange release its first-ever TSX30, a ranking of the top 30 performers over the last three years. The list revealed that marijuana is thriving in the Canadian capital market. Cannabis companies Canopy Growth and Aphria were slot one and six on the ranking, respectively.

But if you look at cannabis more widely, two more companies in the top ranking are also involved in the marijuanna business. Village Farms, ranked second on the list, is a greenhouse grower that recently shifted into growing cannabis.

In addition, Neptune Wellness - in eighth place - also specializes in the extraction, purification, and formulation of cannabis products.

"There's definitely a lot of interest in that sector," Rob Peterman, vice president of global business development for the Toronto Stock Exchange, said in an interview with Markets Insider. "There probably shouldn't really be anything surprising about it."

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Cannabis has been an important theme in Canadian capital markets, Peterman said. It's helped raised capital, spur mergers and acquisitions, and brought new investors to the table since 2014, when the industry first appeared on the Toronto Exchange.

Today, he said that cannabis companies make up about 1% of the $3 trillion Canadian stock market, roughly $50 billion in market value.

The sector has experienced rapid growth since cannabis was legalized for recreational use in October 2018, making it the second country in the world after Uruguay to legalize the cultivation, possession, acquisition and consumption of cannabis and its by-products. Canada has also had legal medicinal cannabis since 2001.

Here are the top 10 companies from the TSX30, ranked in ascending order of share price gains over the last 3 years.