About The Cannabis Factbook

Who Built This

The Cannabis Factbook is maintained by Cannabis Wise Guys, founded by Max Jackson — a former licensed cultivator (Trinity County, California, 2019–2022), cannabis policy consultant, and expert witness.

Max serves as Vice Chair of the Cultivation Committee of the New Jersey Cannabis Business Association. His work spans six states, from legislative testimony to operational diligence for investors and legal teams. The credential behind this resource is operational — not academic.

Why It Exists

No single resource treats the full American cannabis landscape as one picture. Legal states get trade press coverage. Illegal states get ignored. The reality is that all 50 states have a cannabis story — enforcement patterns, economic opportunity cost, political trajectory, border dynamics. This site tells all 50.

Every claim is sourced. Every gap is marked as a gap. If we couldn't find the data, we say so — and explain why.

Methodology

Every figure is compiled from primary public records — state regulatory agencies, legislative records, federal agencies, established policy organizations, and verified reporting — and links to the document it came from. Where a state publishes no clean figure, the gap is marked as a gap rather than filled with a guess, and numbers are never recomputed onto a false common basis to look more comparable than they are.

Each figure carries a source type — what kind of document it came from, not a ranking of how true it is. The label states provenance; you judge reliability. The classification is not asserted as flawless — it is measured, and when a figure is found to be wrong it is corrected against its primary source in the open, not quietly overwritten.

States are grouped by where they stand on legalization — Adult-Use Operational, Legalized — No Retail, Pre-Operational, Medical Only, Decriminalized, and Fully Prohibited — and that grouping shapes the profile: operational states lead with market data, prohibited states lead with enforcement and penalties. Per-capita figures use total state population (U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025), consistent across the benchmark and revenue-potential views. Collection and structuring are assisted by automated research tools; every output is verified against the original agency publication.

This is a summary. For the full methodology — how figures are sourced across both doors, how each record is labeled by source type, and how that labeling is sampled and checked — read the full methodology → (and the About the Data trust note).