Missouri Officials Award Contract For Marijuana Market Study That Will Help Determine Whether To Issue New Licenses

“As it relates to cannabis markets, Missouri is pretty famously the model to follow. So I’m very interested in doing a super deep dive.”

By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent

New York-based Cannabis Public Policy Consulting LLC was awarded a contract this month to study Missouri’s marijuana market for the next year.

The group’s $238,700 contract to conduct an economic-impact study will help the state determine “whether or when the state will be required to issue additional cannabis facility licenses and, if so, how many, where, and of what type,” according to a March press release from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.

Currently, department rules allows only a handful of licenses more than the minimum number required by the constitutional amendments that legalized medical and, subsequently, recreational marijuana for adults.

As a result, the department has issued nearly 400 licenses for cultivation, manufacturing facilities and dispensaries. The rules, for example, allow 27 dispensary licenses in each of the state’s eight congressional districts, while the Constitution requires a minimum of 24.

The state will also eventually have 144 microbusiness licenses, which are limited in size and scope and meant to benefit disadvantaged business owners.

In 2024, Missouri recorded $1.46 billion in total marijuana sales in the state’s second year of adult-use marijuana, outperforming states with a longer history of marijuana legalization like Arizona, Colorado and Nevada.

“As it relates to cannabis markets, Missouri is pretty famously the model to follow,” Mackenzie Slade, the group’s CEO and owner, told The Independent in April. “So I’m very interested in doing a super deep dive.”

Three companies were vying for the contract this spring. One applicant, Oregon-based Whitney Economics, conducts cannabis studies globally but failed to meet one of the requirements regarding managers, according to the state’s bid evaluation.

The other was St. Louis-based Capital Consulting Services, a certified Missouri minority-owned business enterprise that has helped governments with economic feasibility studies for 15 years on a state and federal level. The group submitted a higher bid of $360,000 than Slade’s company and didn’t have as much experience studying cannabis markets.

Founded in 2019, Cannabis Public Policy Consulting is a “100% woman-owned collective of researchers, data scientists, public health professionals, and policy experts working together toward a unified goal: to bring much-needed data, innovation, and nuance to cannabis research and policymaking,” the contract states.

Before becoming an independent LLC, the group worked together as a consulting team incubated by Advocates for Human Potential Inc. and have produced similar market reports for about 12 cannabis regulatory agencies over the last six years, the contract states. That includes the states of Maine, Maryland, Virginia, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Michigan and Utah.

“For a dozen government contracts, CPPC has performed the exact same scope of services as outlined in the RFP; supply and demand assessments and predictive modeling,” it states.

Slade’s company administers a national survey on cannabis use, which essentially measures and quantifies demand behavior for consumers. One of the things that they use it for, she said, at a national level is to try to understand how states are performing based on their policies.

“And Missouri continuously outperforms other states, relative to their date of sale,” she told The Independent, “…because they were able to stand up a market so quickly.”

That was in part, she said, because Missouri limited the number of licenses to get operational within just a few months. For the study, Slade proposed to use the state’s track and trace data to identify the efficiencies of the licenses.

“That’s a prime example of where we would uncover some extremely important considerations for policy,” she said. “And I do believe that the intent of the study is to identify areas of policy that need to be updated.”

Experts generally agree that Missouri’s decision to only issue a few more than the minimum licenses allowed under the constitution has been the key to the industry’s boom. However, critics have long argued that the decision created a monopoly that’s kept out opportunities for people who were most impacted by the war on drugs. While the microbusiness license program was included in the 2022 constitutional amendment to address inequities, the limitations on what these businesses can do make it difficult to turn a profit.

If the department does issue additional licenses, at least half of those licenses must be awarded to owners of cannabis microbusiness facilities that have been operational for at least a year.

The study will also provide information regarding the overall economic stability of the regulated market, including strengths and risks, with a special emphasis on the market’s impact on economically distressed areas of the state, according to the state’s press release.

The Constitution requires the department to develop a plan to “promote and encourage ownership and employment in the marijuana industry by people from political subdivisions and districts that are economically distressed.”

“The study will provide information,” the release states, “relevant to creating and implementing such a plan.”

This story was first published by Missouri Independent.

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Photo courtesy of Mike Latimer.