Sales
In terms of background, marijuana passed / became legal in Colorado at the end of 2012, and the state reports a total of $839,689,434 in total revenue for the state (taxes, license, and fees) with the following breakout:
The greatest takeaway from this chart is the total market place for marijuana, and the growth it has had in terms of sales over the last few years.
Believe it or not, this new industry has been the topic of commercial real estate as there has been an influx in lease rates – primarily for the industrial sector, but there is also some retail involvement as well:
* data from CoStar analytics
Population
One of the other conversation pieces in this topic is the population. That is, I hear many people say that Colorado’s population growth is highly attributed to the new business of marijuana.
Therefore, I just wanted to see what the numbers showed from this time period:
My theory is that marijuana has had an impact, and I know the argument can be made for correlation without causality on all of this but I think more important is that other states (and even counties) are getting more involved in this industry which I think will lower some of the upward movement we have seen over the last five years.
Another way to see this is from the same information on the above displayed sales is in an annual basis as it better depicts the leveling off between 2017 and 2018:
With the adoption of legalization in multiple other states over the years I am predicting we have seen the plateau.