Arizona is No. 10 among marijuana-friendly states

With thousands of new jobs, booming sales, a growing tax base and just in time to celebrate 4/20 today, Arizona is ranked No. 10 among the most marijuana-friendly states in the U.S.

America is getting more and more marijuana-friendly every year. As of April 2021, 17 states have fully legalized marijuana, 27 states have decriminalized it and 36 states have laws allowing the use of medical marijuana. Legalization looks like the future, so QuoteWizard‘s team of analysts took a look at which states are leading the charge.

Key findings among marijuana-friendly states:

• Marijuana sales in fully legalized states passed $10 billion in 2020.

• The number of marijuana-related jobs increased by more than 20% in 2020.

• Colorado, Alaska and Nevada are the most marijuana-friendly states.

To find the most marijuana-friendly states in the nation, we ranked states based on current laws, job growth, taxes and sales per capita. With strong laws, nearly 5,000 new marijuana-related jobs and nearly $1.6 billion in sales, we found that Colorado is the most 420 friendly state in the nation.

Job growth in the marijuana industry

Marijuana is literally and figuratively a growing industry. According to Leafly, the United States now supports 321,000 full-time jobs. To put that in perspective, there are only 201,000 dentists in the U.S.

Methodology: We used several different data sources to create this report. For jobs, we compared Leafly job reports for 2019 and 2020. Sales, tax and per capita information was sourced from the Tax Foundation, Cannabis industry.org, United States Census Bureau and the Motley Fool.

To determine the most marijuana-friendly state, we ranked each state from one to 14 in the categories of job growth, sales per capita and tax revenue per capita. We then added up the rankings and divided them by the number of categories to produce an aggregate number. States were ranked from lowest to highest aggregate number.