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Missouri in 2025
For more insights about Missouri in 2025, follow our series of stories about the state in the year ahead.
Approaching Missouri’s third year of legal recreational marijuana sales, the industry remains robust in the state. Experts say the sector’s continued vitality will depend on the legal climate regionally and nationally, competing products and the dynamics of a maturing market.
Missouri businesses sold more than $1.3 billion worth of marijuana through November, according to state data. In November, recreational sales topped $113 million — the best month on record.
Robin Goldstein, director of the Cannabis Economics Group at the University of California, Davis, said new marijuana markets, like Missouri’s, tend to experience rapid growth initially because they are being built from the ground up, starting at zero.
However, this growth will eventually level off — the uncertainty lies in when that will happen.
To continue upward mobility, Goldstein said, maturing markets should look to established markets like California and Colorado, where efficient, large-scale production and competition have driven prices down.
“As the prices get more and more reasonable and accessible, this benefits consumers, especially disadvantaged groups who have access to affordable medicine,” Goldstein said.
Cross-border business
With laws in neighboring states affecting marijuana demand in Missouri, the future of the state’s market hinges in part on regional dynamics.
Of the eight states that border Missouri, only one — Illinois — has legalized recreational marijuana use. In Kansas, which makes up a portion of the Kansas City metro area, marijuana is fully illegal, despite more than half of the state supporting legalization, according to a 2023 survey.
If Kansas were to legalize marijuana, Missouri’s market could be negatively impacted, Goldstein said.
Buyers from the Illinois side of the St. Louis metro area could also contribute to Missouri’s strong market, said Laurie Parfitt, CEO of LKP Impact Consulting, a cannabis marketing company. Although recreational marijuana use is legal in Illinois, prices can differ across the border.
“Illinois is one of the highest priced markets in the country for cannabis, and it’s less expensive to buy Missouri products,” Parfitt said. “Plus, I think the quality is better in Missouri.”
Marijuana vs. hemp
The marijuana market continues to face a growing challenge: hemp.
The 2018 Farm Bill removed hemp with low levels of the psychoactive delta-9 THC from the definition of marijuana. That has allowed hemp products to be sold without many of the same regulations marijuana faces.
These products include lotions, gummies and beverages, typically filled with CBD, a non-psychoactive cannabinoid.
“It makes it hard to sell marijuana and make money,” said Shane Pennington, a partner with the law firm Porter Wright and the vice-chair of the American Bar Association’s Cannabis Law and Policy General Committee. “You’re also competing against this hemp army that has figured out how to do all this without being regulated, without paying the taxes and all that.”
Goldstein said marijuana retailers in states like Missouri are threatened by hemp because they are selling a similar product to hemp with a different regulatory structure that is more expensive to comply with.
In August, Gov. Mike Parson issued an executive order that banned the sale of unregulated products containing psychoactive cannabis compounds. However, as the year ended, regulators faced challenges controlling the sale of those products, and lawmakers were filing legislation to address their spread, the Missouri Independent reported.
Forecasting Missouri’s marijuana market
Missouri’s marijuana industry has grown to employ nearly 21,000 people, according to a November report from the state’s Division of Cannabis Regulation.
Parfitt believes the industry has taken lessons from other states and learned from their mistakes to create a unique market.
“You have a major trade association that actually really supports the industry in Missouri. It’s the best I’ve seen in the country,” Parfitt said of the Missouri Cannabis Trade Association. “They provide an outlet for operators to work together, meet each other and share best practices.”
Goldstein said the revenue brought in by Missouri marijuana businesses in the last year is not the theoretical maximum, but the continued growth will depend on several things — price, number of products created, interstate commerce and continued efforts at the federal level to reduce restrictions on the drug.
With Missouri’s recreational marijuana industry only two years old, Parfitt said the market will eventually plateau.
“It’s just the nature of the market, but I think they’re set up for a lot of success down the road,” Parfitt said of the state’s cannabis business operators.
”}]] Marijuana in Missouri is a billion-dollar industry. As the state enters its third year of recreational cannabis sales, experts are eyeing a variety of factors. Read More
