Minnesota recreational cannabis sales hit $150M one year in

Minnesotans bought over $150 million worth of recreational cannabis products in the first year of sales at state-licensed stores, the state’s Office of Cannabis Management said in a press release Tuesday.

The state’s 90,000 registered medical cannabis patients also bought over $100 million of medicinal weed, adding to a total of at least $250 million of cannabis sales since last September.

The state’s first non-tribal recreational marijuana shops opened about a year ago, two years after state legalization. Tribal nations were able to move quicker by opening stores on reservations and then negotiating compacts with the state to open off-reservation dispensaries.

Minnesota’s first non-tribal recreational dispensaries open two years after legalization

The number of businesses with adult-use, or recreational, cannabis retail licenses has grown to over 200, according to the office’s market dashboard.

More than 2 in 5 of all cannabis business licenses — including growing licenses — have gone to so-called social equity applicants, originally intended to include people from marginalized communities disproportionately impacted by the criminalization of marijuana. That includes people who were convicted of selling marijuana before it was legalized, or the parents or children of someone with a conviction. The Legislature expanded the definition of social equity so that it included more than one-third of all Minnesotans, according to a Reformer estimate.

The number of cannabis plants being grown by licensed cultivators has skyrocketed in the past year, from around 72,000 plants in inventories last September to around 486,000 plants currently.

The sales and plants numbers don’t include hemp-derived THC products, the low-dose edibles and drinks found in liquor stores and gas stations across the state. Those products were inadvertently legalized by Congress in 2018 and by the Minnesota Legislature in 2022. The industry is facing a possible extinction thanks to a federal ban set to begin in December.

Recreational and medical marijuana sales along with low-dose THC sales generated $45 million in tax revenue from last September to July, the Office of Cannabis Management said. As of a new law that took effect in July, Minnesota’s cannabis tax is 15%. After adding the state’s sales tax, the total tax rate for cannabis is around 22%, and higher in many metro cities.