The Rise and Fall: Charting 2023-2024 state cannabis sales

U.S. cannabis sales continue to grow overall, but nine major states saw sales decline from 2023 to 2024, while the significant growth is coming from the newest adult-use markets

Once heralded as the fastest growing industry in North America, legal cannabis sales have slumped in some of the most important U.S. states.

Overall, the industry continues to grow, but much of its growth is tied to the launch of new adult-use markets such as Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Ohio, while many of the longer running recreational states have been seeing substantial declines in sales, most likely due to a combination of intense competition, oversupply-driven price compression and legal weed losing its novelty among residents and visitors of adult-use states. Ultimately, no two states are exactly alike, so the reasons for varying total sales, sales growth and sales per capita are as diverse as the states themselves. Ongoing competition from the black market, the proliferation of hemp-derived products, onerous taxes, burdensome regulations and a host of other obstacles certainly play a role in stagnant sales.

In this post, Marijuana Venture takes a 30,000-foot view of 26 states generating more than $100 million annually in regulated cannabis sales.

About the Data

Some quick notes before we dive into the data. Marijuana Venture staff compiled cannabis sales data for 39 states, plus Washington, D.C., using official state data where possible.

While many of the small-market states do not publish cannabis sales information, official data was accessible for 24 of the 26 states reporting more than $100 million in marijuana sales (Alaska and Florida seemingly prefer to keep that information hidden, so we used a combination of information from Metrc, Statista and Headset). For several states, we were forced to project sales for a portion of Q4 to come up with a final sales total for 2024. In states where adult-use cannabis and medical marijuana are separate, regulated products, we used the combined sales total to produce a single number.

Markets on the Rise

So do you want the good news or the bad news first?

The good news is that 17 of the 26 states analyzed are showing some sales growth, though four of those states grew at less than 2% from 2023 to 2024.

The state with the most growth — and the most room for future growth — is, not surprisingly, New York, which jumped from $150.9 million in its first year of adult-use sales to $870 million in 2024. The 477% increase in sales is easily attributed to the regulatory mess that was year one, then finally gaining some traction in licensing retailers in year two. The Empire State now has nearly 300 retailers licensed and has a goal of more than 600 by the end of 2025. New York will fly past the $1 billion mark in sales this year and continue to see growth for years to come.

Similarly, Maryland and Ohio were second and third, respectively, in sales growth. Adult-use sales in Maryland started in mid-2023, leading to a 45.1% jump in 2024; Ohio transitioned from medical-only to adult-use in mid-2024 and saw a 39.4% increase as the burgeoning program got under way.

Other states seeing significant growth were Vermont (28.1%), New Jersey (25.6%), Utah (13.9%), Pennsylvania (12.8%), Rhode Island (9.7%), Missouri (9.1%) and Michigan (7.6%).

On the medical side, Pennsylvania has been particularly impressive. At $1.7 billion in sales, it’s the second-largest medical-only market in the country, just behind Florida, which saw its patient count and total sales drop for the first time ever in 2024. While four of the five states bordering Pennsylvania have legalized recreational cannabis, the Keystone State keeps chugging along, with sales increasing every year since the program’s 2018 launch.

Markets on the Decline

On the flip side of the sales equation, Arizona and California are seeing sales declining at the fastest rates. Arizona sales dropped 14% from 2023 to 2024, while California’s regulated market fell by 12.7%.

Medical sales, in particular, have plummeted in Arizona; they’ve fallen by 77% over the past 40 months, including a 33% drop from 2023 to 2024 alone. Adult-use sales peaked in April 2023 at $109.4 million, but the state has now seen year-over-year declines in sales for nine straight months.

California, still the largest market in the country with about $4.3 billion in sales in 2024 — not shocking considering the state’s enormous population — has now seen total sales decline three years in a row after peaking at $5.3 billion in 2021. Like most rec states, California sales peaked during the coronavirus pandemic, with retailers bringing in $485 million in April 2021. But since then, sales have been on a steady slide, including 14 consecutive months of year-over-year declines.

Colorado was next on the ranking of states with declining sales, with the market shrinking by 8.6% from 2023 to 2024. Colorado saw cannabis sales peak in July 2020 at $226.4 million, only to slump to $109.2 million in November 2024, the single worst month of sales in the state since February 2017. Sales have shrunk every year since 2021, including the current run of 43 months in a row of year-of-year declines. That said, there is some hope the shrinking sales may be flattening out: November 2024 was down only 1% compared to November 2023 — a far better number than most months in the past — and December 2024 was down less than 2% compared to December 2023.

Also worth noting is Oregon and Washington, which had been in similar post-pandemic ruts as Colorado, but now seem to be stabilizing. After two years of shrinking sales, Oregon saw a tiny uptick in 2024 — $960 million in sales compared to $955 million in 2023 (a growth rate of 0.5%). Washington continued to shrink, dropping from $1.23 billion to $1.19 billion — still a 3.4% decline, but an improvement over the double-digit losses seen after the pandemic boom.