Colorado’s marijuana industry can celebrate 2021 as a record-breaking year with over $2.22 billion in sales.
The new milestone follows a trend that’s grown since marijuana sales started in January 2014. Each calendar year has welcomed higher numbers, with the latest bar set in 2020 at over $2.19 billion, the state’s Revenue Department reports.
“We’ve hit a record each year since sales began,” said Shannon Gray, marijuana communications specialist at the department’s Marijuana Enforcement Division. Thursday’s announcement “isn’t really out of the ordinary, but more notable that we continue year after year to see an increase.”
In total, Colorado has sold a whopping amount of weed over the past eight years: more than $12 billion. The data spawns from the state’s marijuana sales reports, which track monthly sales made by both medical and retail marijuana stores by county.
For Jocelyn Ayala, general manager at Third Day Apothecary, a medical marijuana dispensary in Colorado Springs, “it doesn’t surprise me at all that sales were up” last year, she said in a phone interview. Ayala, who’s worked in the cannabis industry for six years, noted that January and February are typically the dispensary’s slowest months, but she’s already seen an uptick in 2022.
She attributes the marijuana industry’s increasing sales to both the coronavirus pandemic, which pushed consumers to consider the medicinal benefits of cannabis, and the amplifying of public discourse around weed. [Read more at The Denver Post]
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