California Marijuana Industry is a ‘$25 Billion Opportunity

“Marijuana is already as big a business as coffee and Indian gaming, with analysts estimating $30 billion in annual consumer spending. The trouble is, only one in every five of those dollars are currently spent on legal products. The rest, some $24 billion annually, ends up in black-market pockets, according to a 2016 cannabis report from the Cowen Group, a New York-based market research firm.

But more and more of that money will come out of the shadows in the next two years. This month, voters legalized recreational marijuana use in four states and medical marijuana in four more. California, home to 12 percent of Americans, is expected to triple the size of the legal market when the state begins issuing licenses in 2018. Vivien Azer, a cannabis analyst with Cowen, believes the nation’s legal market will grow ninefold over the next decade, with consumer spending on recreational and medical marijuana hitting $50 billion by 2026.”

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