If you work in cannabis, you’re part of the next great American industry. And if you need a job, or you just want a change in work scenery, there’s no other industry with as much growth and opportunity as those you can find in cannabis.
This is all according to a new exhaustive report from Leafly and the private firm Whitney Economics. The report concluded that by the end of 2018, there were 211,000 full-time workers in the cannabis industry spanning both the medical and adult-use side of things, with more expected growth to come.
“By comparison, there are currently about 52,000 coal mining jobs in the United States,” reads the report. “American beer makers employ 69,000 brewery workers. And 112,000 people work in textile manufacturing.”
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One dilemma researchers ran into while crunching numbers was the U.S. Department of Labor doesn’t track cannabis jobs due to marijuana being illegal on the federal level. Instead they utilized “state-reported data, industry surveys, on-the-ground reporting, Leafly’s proprietary data, and economic formulas devised by Leafly and Whitney Economics” to construct a representative picture of the cannabis industry.
The report also found that 68,000 new jobs were added in the cannabis industry in 2018. Researchers expect another 40,000 legal marijuana jobs to come in 2019 alone, which would account for 110% total jobs increase since 2017 alone. In 2018, Pennsylvania, New York, Florida, and Nevada made up the largest jumps in jobs while researchers believe Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Florida, Arkansas, and California, Massachusetts will see the biggest leaps in 2019.
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“The numbers we’ve discovered lead to one inevitable conclusion: We are witnessing the birth of the next great American industry,” reads the report.
You can read the full report here.
