New Leafly report concludes "legal cannabis now supports 321,000 full-time American jobs"

The folks at Leafly have this notable new report seeking to address this basic question: "How many jobs are in America’s legal cannabis industry?" Here is part of the answer:

The 2022 Leafly Jobs Report found 428,059 full-time equivalent jobs supported by legal cannabis as of January 2022.  In the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, America’s cannabis industry sold nearly $25 billion in products and created more than 107,000 new jobs — enough to fill the Rose Bowl and then some.

That’s a 33% increase in jobs in a single year.  And it marks the fifth year in a row of annual job growth greater than 27%. No other industry in America can match that.  Last year, America’s legal cannabis industry created more than 280 new jobs every day.  In 2021, someone was hired for a cannabis-supported job about every 2 minutes of the work day....

Those 428,059 jobs include direct cannabis jobs like cultivation and retail sales — what are often called “plant-touching jobs” — as well as indirect ancillary jobs that serve licensed companies or depend on legal cannabis sales. Ancillary jobs include work in accounting, human resources, legal affairs, regulatory compliance, security, maintenance, and construction.  Also included are indirect jobs in cannabis media, technology platforms, public relations, lobbying, non-cannabis product suppliers, and industry associations....

America now has three times as many cannabis workers as dentists.  Cannabis workers outnumber insurance salespeople. There are more people employed in the cannabis industry than there are hair stylists, barbers, and cosmetologists—combined....

While legal cannabis now supports 428,059 jobs, the total employment potential in a mature US legal cannabis market is approximately 1.5 million to 1.75 million workers.  The economic and employment potential for legal cannabis remains quite bright for many years to come.