Cannabis is a star. Since Vegas’ first dispensaries opened in 2015, there’s been a lot of medical and adult-use recreational cannabis floating around the Valley—a lot of dispensaries, brands and products, enjoyed by visitors and locals alike. With the help of the Cannabis Compliance Board, the Nevada Cannabis Association and a few local retailers, here’s the Weekly’s attempt to quantify just how popular it is.
420 Week!
16,000 square feet: The size of NuWu’s soon-to-debut Sky High consumption lounge, inside its new, 40,000-square-foot dispensary complex on Main Street in Downtown Las Vegas
100: Number of strains Curaleaf offers at any given time, across all product formats (flower, edibles, etc.)
$965,091,123: Taxable sales of cannabis in 2022 (CCB)
67: The approximate number of Strat towers you’d need to equal the number of prerolls Curaleaf sold in 2022, laid end-to-end.
Here’s our math: Curaleaf sold approximately 231,000+ prerolls in 2022. The Strat tower is 1,149 feet, or 13,788 inches. A one-gram Curaleaf preroll is about 4 inches long; stacked one on each other, you’d need 3,447 to reach the top of the Strat.
This would’ve been much easier to figure out if Curaleaf had a Strat-sized preroll. Hint, hint.
100: Number of active cannabis dispensaries in Nevada, according to the Cannabis Compliance Board
Medical vs. adult-use recreational customers in total 2022 sales: 94.89% Recreational, 5.11% Medical. (Calculation based on total sales, not the total number of of customer transactions)
30,400: The total number of drive-thru transactions at Curaleaf’s Las Vegas Boulevard location in 2022
1,110+: Products available at NuWu Cannabis Marketplace, including flower, vapes, CBD oil, concentrates and more
$147 Million: Cannabis sales that went toward funding Nevada K-12 education in 2022 (NCA).
18,400: That’s the number of agent cardholders (dispensary employees, cultivation house employees, etc.) as of January 2023, according to the Nevada Cannabis Association.
An annual industry demographic survey by the CCB found that, of more than 18,000 agent cardholders surveyed (840 of which identified as cannabis board members, officers, business executives and owners), 60% identified as male and 39% as female; more than half (53%) identified as white, while 19% identified as “Hispanic” and 1% identified as Black.
Curaleaf’s top product categories in terms of units sold, from most to least: Flower, Vapes, Edibles, Concentrates, Beverages
40: Number of provisional consumption lounge licenses announced by the CCB in November 2022, with 37 of those opting to open in unincorporated Clark County or the City of Las Vegas
How can some dispensaries allow customers to pay at the register with debit cards?: We’ve become accustomed to paying cash for cannabis as a result of the difference in legality between the state and federal governments. But some local dispensaries now offer customers the ability to use their debit cards at the register. A source at the Source explains how their “card transaction machines” work:
1. Customers use their debit cards on “mobile ATMs,” also called “ATM terminals.”
2. The mobile ATM converts the transaction to cash.
3. “For what started as a card transaction for the customer, we give change in cash,” says the Source employee.
Click HERE to subscribe for free to the Weekly Fix, the digital edition of Las Vegas Weekly! Stay up to date with the latest on Las Vegas concerts, shows, restaurants, bars and more, sent directly to your inbox!