If it’s jobs that President Trump wants to conjure up during his time in office, then he should look no further than the cannabis cash crop to create more jobs than manufacturing by 2020.
That number comes from New Frontier Data, an authority in business intelligence for the cannabis industry, projects that the legal marijuana market will create 283,422 jobs over the next 13 years. That’s more than the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects will come from industries like manufacturing, utilities, and even government. In fact, the BLS says that the manufacturing sector will shrink by about 814,000 jobs over the next 17 years, utilities by 47,000, and government by 383,000 positions.
“These numbers confirm that cannabis is a major economic driver and job creation engine for the U.S. economy,” said Giadha Aguirre De Carcer, Founder and CEO of New Frontier Data. “While we see a potential drop in total number of U.S. jobs created in 2017, as reported by Kiplinger, as well as an overall expected drop in GDP growth, the cannabis industry continues to be a positive contributing factor to growth at a time of potential decline. We expect the cannabis industry’s growth to be slowed down to some degree in the next 3 to 5 years, however with a projected total market sales to exceed $24 billion by 2025, and the possibility of almost 300,000 jobs by 2020, it remains a positive economic force in the U.S.”
In 2016, the legal cannabis market was worth an estimated $7.2 billion in 2016, and that number is only growing at a compound rate of 17%, according to projections. Sales will go from $4.7 billion in 2016 to $13.3 billion in 2020, in medical cannabis alone. On the adult-use recreational end, those sales are expected to reach $11.2 billion by 2020.
New Frontier’s projections are based on the markets that are already part of legal initiatives, meaning the 28 states with some form of medical or adult-use marijuana for sale. The numbers do not include any additional states that may pass legalization measures between now and 2020, though the number of revenue and jobs would significantly increase if more states expand their legalized cannabis programs.

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