Someone asked how much cannabis revenue North Carolina could bring in.
I could start thinking about an estimate with $350 million per year, fully phased in, for adult-use.
To start with, it’s useful to think of tax revenue and monopoly revenue as interchangeable. The state can charge whatever the market will bear. It can charge zero in taxes and take all the money as monopoly profits, or it can get all the money as taxes and take zero as monopoly profits.
Caveats: I think it’s useful to acknowledge that there’s a lot of money that needs to be spent up front, that it takes a while for the revenue to start rolling in, and that revenue builds up slowly.
With a population of over 10 million people, that $350 million for North Carolina is less than $35 per capita per year. Here are some comparisons, all verbatim from Claude A.I, which can be wrong.:
Taxes
State cannabis markets vary enormously by population size, so raw dollar totals (California’s $1 billion-plus vs. Vermont’s $30 million) don’t tell you much about relative “market maturity” per resident. Normalizing 2025 state cannabis tax revenue (compiled by the Marijuana Policy Project from official state sources) against 2024 Census population estimates gives a very different picture:
| State | 2025 Tax Revenue | Population | Per Capita |
| Montana | $74.6M | 1.14M | ~$65 |
| Washington | $495.8M | 8.06M | ~$62 |
| Michigan | $507.3M | 10.20M | ~$50 |
| Nevada | $157.9M | 3.32M | ~$48 |
| Vermont | $29.7M | 0.65M | ~$46 |
| Illinois | $552.6M | 12.78M | ~$43 |
| Massachusetts | $290.6M | 7.21M | ~$40 |
| Colorado | $220.9M | 6.01M | ~$37 |
| New Mexico | $74.6M | 2.14M | ~$35 |
| Alaska | $25.4M | 0.74M | ~$34 |
| Oregon | $143.7M | 4.29M | ~$33 |
| Arizona | $246.7M | 7.69M | ~$32 |
| Maine | $43.4M | 1.41M | ~$31 |
| California | $1.049B | 39.66M | ~$26 |
| Missouri | $137.4M | 6.28M | ~$22 |
| Rhode Island | $17.3M | 1.12M | ~$15 |
| Maryland | $90.4M | 6.31M | ~$14 |
| Connecticut | $41.9M | 3.71M | ~$11 |
| Ohio | $130.6M | 11.94M | ~$11 |
| New York | $173.4M | 20.00M | ~$9 |
| New Jersey | $78.5M | 9.62M | ~$8 |
Monopoly profits
SQDC (cannabis monopoly in Québec):
- Total sales: $809.5 million (up 9.2% from $741.5 million the year before)
- Net income: $132.4 million (up from $118.1 million in FY2024-25)
- The full $132.4 million net income was paid as a dividend to Quebec’s Minister of Finance
- On top of that, SQDC remitted $198.9 million in Quebec’s share of excise tax (plus $79.9 million to the federal government)
- Quebec’s treasury take, combining the dividend and its excise share, came to roughly $331.3 million, with $250.6 million of that specifically earmarked for the Fonds de lutte contre les dépendances (the province’s addiction-prevention fund)
9 million population – total take around $37 per capita.
The Center for New Revenue 