Boulder firm: Legal pot sales could crack $40B in 2024

BOULDER — Global sales of legal cannabis are on pace to be $14.9 billion this year and could crack $40 billion by 2024, according to a recent report co-authored by Boulder-based BDS Analytics.

“State of Legal Cannabis Markets,” the report from BDS and Arcview Market Research, found that revenue growth slowed a bit in 2018. Still, that growth was 20 percent, a figure that would be the envy of most other industries.

Last year “was the slowest annual expansion the legal cannabis industry has seen since Colorado launched the adult-use era in 2014,” the report said. “California surprised the industry by becoming the first state to have its legal spending on cannabis fall, from $3 billion in 2017 to $2.5 billion, in the year in which it implemented an adult-use regulatory regime.”

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The report found “that highly restrictive regulations and high tax rates are hurting the legal market’s ability to compete with the illicit market.”

“State of Legal Cannabis Markets” is the first report of its kind  to analyze the total cannabinoid market (TCM), which includes medical and recreational cannabis sales in regulated dispensaries, plus sales of FDA-approved pharmaceuticals and hemp-based CBD products, according to BDS.

“In 2018, the FDA approved GW Pharmaceutical’s Epidiolex and passed the 2018 Farm Bill legalizing hemp in the United States,” Arcview CEO Troy Dayton said in a prepared statement. “These decisions being made at the federal level put pharmacies and general retailers in the business of selling CBD-based products in all 50 states, which substantially boosted the TCM. In the U.S. alone, sales of CBD products in all channels will hit $20 billion by 2024.”