Cannabis Sales during Covid-19

With the introduction of Covid-19 in December of 2019, and the start of the pandemic in early 2020 America was put on halt. Businesses all over America were forced to temporarily close to stop the spread of the virus which resulted in many businesses having to permanently shut down. While most businesses were being forced to close, there were also businesses that were deemed ‘essential’ for society to stay afloat. Recreational and medical dispensaries were included on this list which allowed them to continue to operate basically unhindered by the pandemic.

People no longer had to drive to work in the mornings, but instead just had to roll out of bed and get on their computer to start their workday. Students no longer had in-person classes, but instead attended their classes through Zoom calls. In a lot of these calls, students weren’t required to have their cameras on, so they didn’t, allowing them to do basically whatever they wanted during class. People began ordering everything they needed online and having it delivered to them to avoid the virus. Everyone was spending all of their time at home, just waiting for the pandemic to end, which it did not. Over the next two years, people would have a lot more time to themselves in which they could intake cannabis. Going into work or class while on cannabis is illegal in most situations, but when you’re in the comfort of your own home, there is no one to stop you.

I hypothesize that the sale of cannabis will have gone up by higher margins during the Covid-19 pandemic than it had in the years leading up to the pandemic. To do this I used CSV files that contained information about the cannabis sales in Colorado back to 2014, which was the year when licensed sales of recreational cannabis began in the state.

I began by calculating the sum of all cannabis sales by year in Colorado. Cannabis sales have gone up every year in Colorado sense it was legalized. From 2014 to 2021, cannabis sales have seen a 508% increase!

The information below shows the increase in cannabis sales from year to year in Colorado.

The y-axis of the graph represents the percent growth the cannabis saw that year. The x-axis of the graph represents each year of data that was analyzed. 0 represents 2014, and 6 represents 2021.

As could be expected the largest growth of cannabis sales was the year it was legalized in Colorado. During cannabis’s first year being legalized, it saw 96.7% growth. The growth in cannabis sales then began to steadily decline due to there being fewer new customers to buy the product. Sales decline fairly steadily, only having an 11.9% increase in sales from 2017 to 2018. From 2018 to 2019 sales increase saw a larger increase of 16.3%. This information was interesting to me because the pandemic wasn’t happening in 2019. What I wasn’t expecting was for cannabis sales to decline again once the pandemic hit. An interesting reason for why this could happen that a friend brought up to me was because the economy was suffering. This makes sense because if there is less money to buy weed, people are going to buy less weed. I thought that the sales of cannabis would increase due to people spending more time at home and not having to commute anywhere. One thing to note is that while the increase of cannabis sales from year to year is decreasing, the money being made each year is still increasing. Colorado still sold a record high of $1,635,891,379 in 2021.

I think an interesting dataset that would be interesting to include would be the sales of alcohol before and during the pandemic. As I stated in the research above there were a lot fewer reasons to drive during the heightened points of the pandemic when most businesses were closed. I feel like this could increase the amount of alcohol consumed.