Rhode Island officials recently updated their cannabis sales numbers, spanning back to the original launch of the state’s adult-use market in December 2022, after Marijuana Moment requested clarification citing that the retail totals didn’t match up with the sum of reported medical and recreational sales.
The update fixed figures that sometimes amounted to tens of thousands of dollars in discrepancies. In other cases, the differences were small. September, for example, only had a discrepancy of $0.04, while other errors ranged from nearly $70,000 above the expected total to more than $124,000 below.
According to Marijuana Moment, officials updated the numbers for medical, adult-use and total retail sales on Tuesday for the past 10 months, correcting what an auditor said were “data-entry mistakes.”
“The large monetary discrepancies occurred from human error,” said Cindy Miller, an investigative auditor for the Department of Business Regulation. “I transposed some numbers incorrectly.” According to Miller, the error likely came as monthly reports were compiled from various sources provided by Metrc, which Rhode Island uses as its third-party track-and-trace software.
Miller said that the errors were fixed after pulling several Metrc reports to consolidate and summarize those reports.
“I am no longer the only person working with industry reporting, and we now have a process in place to catch these errors sooner,” she said.
The state numbers still showed that Rhode Island’s licensed cannabis retailers sold more adult-use cannabis than ever in September, even after accounting for the updates. Last month totaled $7,116,727 in total receipts. The total retail sales for the month amounted to $9.63 million, including $7.03 million in adult-use and $2.52 million in medical sales, just shy of the $9.67 million record set in August 2023. August also marked the fourth consecutive month of record cannabis sales by licensed stores.
While the adult-use sales continue rising, medical sales are steadily dropping — a trend consistent with many states that usher in recreational cannabis laws. In September, the medical numbers hit a record low since adult-use sales began.
September also saw record-high sales of concentrates and pre-rolls, while edibles, pre-packaged flower, tinctures, topicalsn and vape carts all saw lower numbers when compared to August.
Rhode Island is still one of the newer cannabis markets in the U.S., as the Rhode Island Cannabis Act was signed into law on May 25, 2022 — making it the 19th state in the country to legalize possession, home-growing and sale of recreational cannabis.
It’s also one of several other states that hit monthly sales records in August, joining states like Montana, New Mexico, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Maryland — and the momentum appears to be continuing across the country.
Illinois cannabis stores sold more individual cannabis products than during any prior month in September. Connecticut hit a new record in September, tallying more than $25 million, and licensed dispensaries in Maryland also sold a record amount of adult-use cannabis products in September, additionally setting monthly records for vape and infused product sales.
Similar to Rhode Island, New Mexico’s September sales also narrowly missed a monthly sales record set the previous month, though the state did pass the half-billion-dollar mark in total adult-use sales.
While these trends seem promising for newer cannabis markets, others like Colorado — one of the first to introduce recreational cannabis laws — have slipped throughout the past several years, namely falling from its peak during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, the state recently shared that it passed the benchmark of more than $15 billion in legal cannabis sales since the market launch, though annual sales peaked in 2021 (reaching about $2.2 billion) and have since declined and mostly leveled out.
