Schager said the recreational market will create a “completely different landscape” for her and other established medical providers. “I think we’ll see some disruption in the market in January and February, and it will probably take a few months for everything to mellow out,” she said. There’s a ton of excitement in the community right now, but I’d say most providers are pretty stressed.” Michaela Schager, owner of Montana Medicinals in Missoula “This is going to be a totally different ball game. She said it takes a minimum of seven to nine weeks for a cannabis plant to fully flower, and she worries there won’t be enough. Michaela Schager, owner of Montana Medicinals in Missoula, said she is doing everything she can to ramp up cultivation in the months before the adult-use market opens. House Bill 701, the legislation that set the framework for the recreational market, gave existing producers an 18-month head start on everyone else, meaning new adult-use producers won’t be able to get into the market until July 2023. The federal ban also prohibits dispensaries from importing cannabis across state lines, even from states where marijuana is legal. Because cannabis is still illegal at the federal level, it’s nearly impossible for producers to get traditional financing, since banks are hesitant to work with dispensaries because of the federal prohibition. Growing that much cannabis is capital intensive, and not everyone has the resources to ramp up production to the legal maximum. Only a few producers in the state are growing at that level, Petersen said.īesides the legal limits, there are also financial limits. A tier 1 producer can grow up to 1,000 square feet of product, and a tier 9 producer can grow up to 20,000 square feet across as many as six locations.
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Producers can grow only a specific amount of cannabis at a time based on a tiered system, according to Montana Code Annotated. The UM study estimates similar numbers will be seen in Montana.īut cannabis can’t be grown overnight, and there are limits to how much a dispensary can grow. According to a 2019 study from the Colorado Tourism Office, 6% of tourists said legal marijuana was one of the main reasons for their visit, and 15% of all tourists visited at least one dispensary. The UM study said legal cannabis will also draw tourists to Montana, as it has in other states. Petersen and others involved in the industry estimate that the adult-use cannabis market will be three to five times bigger than the current medical market once it opens up next year.
During fiscal year 2020, medical marijuana users consumed about 12 metric tons of cannabis.
Credit: Justin Franz / MTFPĪccording to a 2020 study from the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research, Montana adults consume between 30 and 33 metric tons of cannabis annually for medical and recreational purposes (even while recreational use remained illegal). The Fruit Factory in Columbia Falls is one of a number of medical marijuana dispensaries preparing for the opening of the adult-use market on Jan. The same thing happened in New York and New Jersey this year. Within days of recreational cannabis becoming legal in Illinois last year, some dispensaries in Chicago ran out of product and shortages persisted for weeks and months.
We’re barely keeping up with demand right now.” “That’s what happened everywhere else when the recreational market opened up. “I think we’re going to run out of weed in less than a week,” said Pepper Petersen, president and CEO of the Montana Cannabis Guild. But pent-up demand also brings up another concern: Will Montana’s dispensaries be able to meet that demand come January? 1, 2022 - a message that might not be clear to out-of-state tourists who may have heard that weed has been legalized in Big Sky Country but haven’t closely followed the new law.įor adult-use marijuana advocates, the fact that customers are already trying to buy is a sign that their forecast of legalized cannabis becoming a multi-million-dollar industry in the state was correct. While Palmer’s Fruit Factory can sell cannabis to Montana residents with a medical marijuana card, it will not be legal to sell it for non-medical adult use until Jan. A few times a day, someone from out of town will walk into one of Paulson Palmer’s three dispensaries in northwest Montana asking if they can buy marijuana.
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