Who’s Buying All the Weed in Colorado?
When I think of Colorado, the first few things that come to mind are mountains, skiing, hiking — and of course — weed. Colorado is the first US state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana for adults (NPR). Not only does Colorado have 370 medical dispensaries, but also 670 recreational cannabis retail stores (Colorado Cannabis Information). Solely based on the number of retail store locations, you can bet that recreational cannabis retail sales in Colorado have reached new highs since its legalization in 2014. To better understand how the legalization of recreational marijuana influenced cannabis retail sales, I explored records of Colorado counties’ cannabis retail sales from 2014 to 2020.
Upon analyzing the data, I first sought to uncover how much a person, on average, annually spends on recreational cannabis per Colorado county. Across Colorado’s total population since 2014, the average person spends about $170 on recreational cannabis per year. However, let’s say you are a frequent recreational cannabis consumer and you spend around $50 a month on recreational weed. That comes out to about $600 spent over the entire year.
With that in mind, I decided to filter through the cannabis retail sales to find the counties with average annual cannabis retail sales totaling over $1,000 per person. I was interested to see what Colorado counties had a notably greater average annual total spent on recreational marijuana. To do so, I combined the cannabis sales by county dataset with the county demographics dataset to find the ratio of cannabis retail sales to the total population for a given year and county. To retrieve the average annual spent, I only accounted for the years where total cannabis retail sales were over $0 (as that assumes there were open and running recreational dispensaries in these counties). Turns out, of the 44 Colorado counties listed in the dataset, only four counties have an average annual total spent on recreational marijuana per person over $1,000: Costilla County, Las Animas County, Ouray County, and Sedgwick County.
Before fully analyzing each county’s average annual total spent on recreational marijuana per person, it is essential to address that this statistic does not account for tourists or non-residents of the county in the number of retail sales. This dataset only provides the total retail sales per year per county, so the statistic may be overestimating the true average. Although with the given datasets there is no breakdown of retail cannabis sales by residents and non-residents of a given county, exploring each county’s geographic location was insightful.
All counties listed, aside from Ouray County, border at least one other neighboring state. Out of the four, Las Animas County ranks the highest with an average of about $2,845 spent annually per person since 2015. Per year, Las Animas yields $41,827,589 in total cannabis retail sales on average. As of 2020, Las Animas County’s annual average spent per person was $4,865.
I think it’s safe to assume that not all of Las Animas County’s ~14,775 residents are spending this much on recreational cannabis. So what might be causing such a high statistic? For one, I-25, the highway that traces the north-to-south side of Colorado, runs through Las Animas. The high traffic on I-25 is likely a contributing factor to the high number of recreational cannabis sales as tourists and travelers pass through. On top of that, Las Animas borders New Mexico. Up until 2021, the use of recreational marijuana was illegal in New Mexico, so New Mexico residents have likely been frequent visitors of Las Animas to make recreational cannabis purchases that would be otherwise illegal in their home state (NM RLD). This is congruent with the fact that Costilla County, which also borders New Mexico, has an average of $1,282 spent annually per person on recreational marijuana since 2016.
Similarly in Colorado’s northeastern corner, Sedgwick County’s cannabis sales went from nonexistent to skyrocketing. Up until 2020, Sedgwick had neither medical nor retail cannabis sales according to this dataset. Assuming, 2020 marked the opening of recreational dispensaries, Sedgwick yielded $3,680,109 in their first year of cannabis retail sales. That would mean on average a Sedgwick resident spent about $1,527 on recreational weed. Like Las Animas and Costilla, Sedgwick borders Nebraska where medical and recreational use of marijuana is illegal.
On the other hand, Ouray County yields an average of about $5,024,318 in cannabis retail sales per year. This means that, on average, a person in Ouray hypothetically spends a total of $1,043 a year on recreational cannabis. Although Ouray does not border neighboring states like the other three counties discussed do, US Route 550 runs through Ouray. This highway runs from Montrose, Colorado into Bernalillo, New Mexico, just outside Albuquerque (Intertropolis & Routeville Wiki). Not only that, but the Million Dollar Highway is a 25-mile stretch that lives on US 550 which is known for its spectacular scenic views and historic towns (Visit Ouray). Given the heavy traffic through Ouray via US 550 and the Million Dollar Highway, it’s highly possible that tourists and non-residents of Ouray are heavily contributing to their recreational marijuana sales.
All in all, it’s not a coincidence that these counties that border states that have not legalized marijuana up until recently or still haven’t to this day have experienced astoundingly high recreational cannabis sales. While Coloradans are definitely reaping the benefits of the legalization of recreational cannabis, it seems as though tourists and residents of neighboring states are as well.
