Legal Marijuana Sales to Hit $22 Billion by 2020

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 1:36PM EST · Published Feb 5, 6:55AM EST

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[cnxvideo id=”625479″ placement=”ros”]The legal sales of pot will reach $21.8 billion in 2020, up from $5.4 billion last year. The legalization of marijuana has and will spread rapidly from state to state.

The data from a new report titled “The State of Legal Marijuana Markets” explain that part of the forecast has as a foundation the sales in Colorado and Washington, where pot use for medical and recreational use is already legal. The research shows that the rise will be rapid year by year:

Demand is expected to remain strong in 2016 with legal markets projected to grow to $6.7 billion, a 24% increase over 2015

The huge majority of the rise in sales will be due to recreational use, which was only 8% of the market in 2014 but is anticipated to be 53% in 2020.

State legalization may be still expanding by the time a national law is passed to legalize marijuana use nationwide. This will leave states that have not supported legalization in a quandary. The report forecast:

Majority support for legalization is fueling a national policy shift The industry’s continued expansion was matched by equally strong growth in popular support for cannabis legalization nationally. According to Gallup, 58% of Americans now support legalization of cannabis for adult use, up from 36% in 2005; a separate poll by Harris found 81% of Americans support legalization for medical use.

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More information is available from several stories published by 24/7 Wall St. These include:

And our weekly report on marijuana prices.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.