New York cannabis regulators published a year-end review of the state’s legal cannabis system on Friday, highlighting major milestones and offering a snapshot of the market almost exactly a year after the state’s first adult-use sales began.
Consumers purchased more than 3.5 million cannabis products during the year, New York State’s Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) said in the report. Once December figures are tallied, total sales for the year are expected to exceed $150 million.
That activity brought in more than $32 million in state revenue, including nearly $16.3 million during fiscal year 2023 and upward of $16.6 million by the midpoint of fiscal 2024. Despite the nine-figure sales number, the totals are relatively low for a recreational cannabis market in a state with such a sizable population.
New York’s rollout of legal cannabis slowed to a crawl in 2023 amid a court injunction that barred regulators from processing hundreds of new retailer licenses. That created a bottleneck in the market from August until early December when the state Supreme Court finally lifted the injunction. 2023’s sales figures likely would have been far higher if the launch of the adult-use market had proceeded without interruption. Currently, only about 40 licensed adult-use retailers have opened for business across all of New York State, the report says.
Read more at marijuanamoment.net