Here are three excellent cannabis-related questions for a late-night Trivial Pursuit game with fellow aficionados. What country was the first to legalize adult-use recreational cannabis? (Hint: it’s in the Southern hemisphere and has one-third of New York City’s population). Next, what country consumes the most cannabis? And finally, which one produces the most? When you’re done Googling the answers, and the shock wears off, ask yourself this question.
What will be the next big legal adult-use cannabis market? And how big will it be? (Hint: it’ll be bigger than all the legal rec recreational cannabis markets in the world today, combined.)
The following charts track changes over the last 10 years for the three most popular recreational drugs, and the differences in usage rates between the United States, Canada and the European Union. Note that Great Britain is separated in the 2024 chart because of Brexit in 2020.
The only other market with the potential to be bigger than the EU is Asia, but one look at what happened in Thailand last year suggests it will be a while before they start discussing medical or recreational cannabis in Tokyo, Beijing or New Delhi. The cultural hurdles for cannabis are always steep. To be a contender for this title of “The Next Big Cannabis Market,” a region needs three basic elements: a population with a significant enough disposable income to buy it, a governing structure liberal enough to allow it, and a culture that not only allows but promotes recreational drug consumption. For better or worse, they have to like a good party, and all party gateways are paved with tobacco and soaked in alcohol.
In the United States, the Controlled Substances Act classified more than 1,000 drugs, though, somewhat surprisingly, the two drugs that kill more people every year than all the drugs on the list combined are not even on the schedule. Worldwide, alcohol kills more than 3 million people a year; tobacco kills more than 5 million. They are the largest cause of preventable deaths, and not incidentally, the majority of those deaths are in the EU.
In the world of statistics, they are also known as leading indicators. Look at this chart again, and notice how the level of consumption of one party drug tends to correlate to the consumption of others, with one big exception. For a region that drinks more alcohol than any other in the world, and the only Western culture with increasing rates of cigarette use, the EU’s cannabis consumption rates are incredibly low — about one-sixth of the Canadian consumption rate and a quarter of the U.S., even though they drink more alcohol in the EU, and a lot more than in the U.S.
The reason the EU consumes much less cannabis is simple. Europeans have been controlling the flow of contraband across their (smaller) borders for hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of years, and they’re bloody good at it. Not to mention, weed is about the stinkiest, bulkiest drug out there. Smugglers minimize their risk and maximize profits by taking more valuable, compact and less malodorous drugs like heroin and cocaine across borders.
Consequently, here are my top three interpretations from all this data:
– The more a region uses cigarettes and alcohol, the more cannabis they consume, when it’s legal.
– Legalization more than doubles cannabis consumption, and the EU has the biggest margins for growth.
– All 27 EU countries have some form of legalized cannabis. Most are medical only, and only three allow for recreational use; however, all are discussing legalization now, because governments are addicted to tax revenue.
This year and last, I was invited to speak on the extraction panel at the International Cannabis Business Conference in Berlin, and I was amazed at the difference a year made in the German cannabis market. Germany proves what happens when the walls come down, literally. It’s party time, and they absolutely love smoking weed. Extracts are still verboten there, but that’s changing too, and in some markets, like France and Spain, the focus is on edibles and vapes, since they’re safer than smoking. Statisticians project a 400% increase in legal sales over the next decade in the EU, and higher rates in the United Kingdom. They are discovering that, as party drugs go, cannabis is a much less harmful option.
This is why consumption of cannabis has surpassed rates of alcohol and tobacco consumption in the U.S. and Canada as the legalization wave spreads globally. Given that the world’s largest producer is Morocco, its largest consumer is India, and Uruguay first legalized cannabis for adult use more than a decade ago, it’s already global. Knowing firsthand how the EU enjoys its leisure and celebrations, I predict that in the next decade, as with alcohol and cigarettes, the EU and UK will consume more cannabis per capita than any other region in the world, once it’s legalized for adult use.