Maybe not. It might depend on whether you own a retail store, work as a budtender, or visit as a consumer.
Various cannabis news outlets have started to dissect the Cannabis Control Commission’s recently published Review and Assessment of the Massachusetts Adult and Medical Use Cannabis Industries. A common refrain regarding the revenue side of things is that the markets are cooling, but that might not be accurate.
Cannabis sales in Massachusetts are plateauing. But sales are the amount of money consumers spend—not the amount of product consumers buy.
It’s a bit of a jagged ride, but you can see how the revenue curve is leveling off in the chart below.
At the same time, producer prices continue to decrease. The cost per gram has dropped from around $14.35 in November 2018 to $4.36 on Dec. 31, 2024, according to the CCC’s open data platform. That represents nearly a 70% price drop. But if prices are dropping and revenue is increasing, that means a lot more volume is flowing through the system.
If we assume that consumers purchase recreational cannabis for its pleasurable effects, driven primarily by THC, the euphoria inducing component of the plant, and that THC can be purchased in raw form (flower or pre-rolls), enhanced form (vapes and oils), or in mixed form (edibles like gummies), and since some of these product categories have remained somewhat steady as a component of overall market sales (flower is still the most popular method of purchasing cannabis), then dividing sales (which are leveling off) by cost per gram (which is sliding down faster than a 10-year-old on a snow tube), we might get a sense of volume …
Producers feel the squeeze the most. It is their raw material that is dropping in value. Retailers have to sell substantially more product volume to maintain the same sales level. As in any market, some retailers will continue to adapt, get creative, and grow their share while others will stagnate and disappear.
Whether the market is cooling off or not depends on what side of the equation you are on.
Keep following Talking Joints Memo for further analysis of the latest Massachusetts industry report.
