Article from Newsweek by Melina Delkic.

California’s legal pot market is rolling out with a bang.

Nearly $2 billion has been invested in the stock market since California’s January 1 statewide marijuana legalization, and shares of companies producing, distributing or selling marijuana soared on Tuesday, Fortune reported.

Seven major cannabis-related firms, mostly based in Canada, saw a $1.7 billion increase in value for their stocks—Canopy Growth shares rose in value by 9 percent; Aurora (in Vancouver) by 24 percent; Aphria (in Ontario) by 8 percent; Cronos (in Toronto) by 5 percent; MedReleaf (in Canada) by 27 percent; Canntrust (also in Canada) by 5 percent; and in the United Kingdom, GW Pharma increased by 2 percent—and brought their total value to more than $19 billion, Fortune reported.

The increase in value is a notable boost, but not necessarily a huge surprise. In Colorado, where marijuana was legalized in 2014, sales hit $1 billion in the first eight months of 2017 alone, The Denver Post reported. In Canada, the weed market is estimated to be almost as big as the market for wine, Newsweek reported in December, with Canadians consuming $4.8 billion worth of the drug—long before the country’s actual legalization, set for July of this year. Bloomberg estimates that the market will bring in $310 million after legalization.

Read the entire article at Newsweek.

Image Credit: By Chmee2 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons