Is Legal Marijuana Earning More Money Than Wine, Bread, and Milk?

This week, the Seattle Times reports that “Legal marijuana sales in Spokane County topped retail sales of wine and kitchen staples such as bread and milk last year.” In the parts of the country where marijuana can be legally bought and sold, the product is proving just as lucrative as expected: Spokane’s sales topped $5 million in March, and in the last month of 2015, the state of Colorado sold a whopping $62.2 million.

There’s no doubt that cannabis sales are incredibly impressive, but within the Seattle Times article are a whole mess of caveats that sort of disprove the “cannabis sold more than bread” headline. The biggest problem: that comparison is based on a per-household average.

The problem is that milk, bread, and even wine are bought by the vast majority of households, whereas, according to the (admittedly very premature, but the best we have) data from a 2013 study, only one in five households spend any money at all on cannabis products. So a per-household average doesn’t mean much; cannabis is sort of like a luxury product, expensive but only bought by a small percentage of people. It’d be like saying sales of iPhones outsold sales of bread. It’s probably true, but it’s not really very useful.

Still, this is healthy news for the nascent legal cannabis industry; regardless of how spurious the comparison to milk and bread is, there’s no denying that cannabis has proven a highly valuable, in-demand product.