Article by FLN Staff.

Beer Sales may be hurting because of legal weed, but wine sales are not beer sales. There are apparently jitters among alcohol merchants that legalized marijuana will impact their sales. Americans bought $41 Billion worth of wine in 2017, according to Nielsen Data, meaning that merchants have a lot to lose.

Forbes did an analysis in states where marijuana has been legalized. In Colorado, wine sales are up, not down. Yet, beer sales have been sliding in recent years. Why is that?

It’s likely the substitution effect, as when marijuana was illegal in these places, beer was a legal-low cost high. Marijuana consumption, both legal and illegal, serves the same purpose, as marijuana can serve as a substitute for beer, and vice-versa. Wine, on the other hand, didn’t fall into that category. The other less surprising fact is that wine consumers, and everybody else, have had access to marijuana for some time and still buy wine. The two, so far, are unrelated.

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