North America’s cannabis sales grew to $6.7 billion for 2016, up 30% from 2015, according to a report by Arcview Market Research.
U.S. sales, meanwhile, totaled $5.86 billion for 2016.
This is the first time Canada, which has legalized medical cannabis, was included Arcview’s report. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government plans to introduce legislation this spring legalizing recreational cannabis.
“You will not find another multibillion-dollar market growing at 25% anywhere in the world that is not already filled with multinational companies and institutional investors,” Arcview CEO Troy Dayton said in the release.
Tom Adams, Arcview’s new editor-in-chief, added: “The only consumer industry categories I’ve seen reach $5 billion in annual spending and then post anything like 25% compound annual growth in the next five years are cable television (19%) in the 1990s and the broadband internet (29%) in the 2000s.”
The four states that approved recreational marijuana in 2016 – Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada and California – were the “biggest game-changer” for the industry’s future, Adams noted.
He added that spending in the largest three existing recreational markets – Colorado, Washington and Oregon – “was up 62% through September after doubling in 2015, fueled in large part by the sudden popularity of alternative ingestion methods such as edibles and concentrates.”
The full Arcview report will be available in February.
