By: Dan Taylor, Trilogy Wellness Marketing Coordinator
A new report shows that the U.S. cannabis industry is exploding with full-time jobs, averaging some 280 per day.
A newly released, joint-investigation by Leafly and Whitney Economics, discovered that as of January 2022, there more 428,059 full-time cannabis employees nationwide. Whitney Economics is considered the country’s top cannabis employment study.
Federal prohibition prevents the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics from counting state-legal cannabis jobs.
That means there are more cannabis jobs than firefighters, insurance agents, and bank tellers in America.
It marks the fifth year in a row where cannabis jobs grew more than 27% in a $25 billion dollar U.S. industry.
Those jobs in the canna industry included not only growers and processors, but human resources, sales, marketing, public relations, and lobbyists.
In 2017 alone, both Leafly and Whitney Economics found that full-time cannabis jobs in the U.S. were at more than 120,000. That’s more than triple what it is today.
If California were a country, it would be the world’s fifth largest economy. The state is leading in cannabis sales and jobs. Some 83,000 people are fully employed in California’s canna industry. The state brings in more than $5 billion in annual cannabis sales.
The appetite for Americans to buy legal cannabis is also high when it comes to common household foods such as beer, wine, milk, and orange juice. The report found that cannabis ranked fourth among such products.