EAST LANSING —Demand for legal cannabis products in the United States continued to climb in February 2020, according to Anderson Economic Group’s monthly AndCanIndex.

While the 2019 legal cannabis market showed steady growth through July, late summer numbers softened just slightly before demand continued to increase through the fall and winter. Those increases led to a strong start for 2020, with trends through February indicating 16.2 percent year-over-year growth.

Kenan Cosguner, Anderson Economic Group’s lead analyst for this market, is confident that the upward trend will continue in the long term. However, “the COVID-19 outbreak will have a negative impact on the market over the next several months,” says Cosguner.

AEG’s experts produce this monthly measurement by closely following 50-state trends for both the recreational and medicinal marijuana markets. Monthly calculations are based on benchmarks developed when AEG first began assessing the market in 2015.

The National Association of Business Economists recently recognized the superior quality of this work by awarding Patrick L. Anderson a 2019 “Best Contributed Paper” award for the manuscript “Blue Smoke and Seers: Measuring Latent Demand for Cannabis Products in a Partially Criminalized Market.” This paper, now available online in the journal Business Economics, documents the methodology and challenges faced in development of the AndCan^®Index.