It was never going to be all sunshine and legal gummies. But few imagined it would unravel this fast.
Just five years ago, cannabis legalization seemed like the fastest-growing industry in North America. Between 2018 and 2021, investors poured billions into grow ops, dispensary chains, and weed-tech startups. Everyone from venture capitalists to celebrities wanted a piece of the green rush. Politicians competed to out-progressive each other on cannabis reform. Analysts called it “the next tech boom.” Companies were labeled “the Apple” or “the Amazon” of cannabis. And for a moment, it felt like they were.
Fast forward to 2025: the landscape has shifted as the hype wore off.
What comes next is something stranger, a kind of capitalist hangover.
The dawn of a post-rush cannabis economy feels more like a cautionary tale.
Cracks in the Empire
Joseph Schumpeter, part of that legendary group of early 20th-century economists, dedicated his work to unraveling the dynamics of business cycles. He saw these cycles as a process of emergence, consolidation, and eventual decline. New technologies allowed businesses to emerge and trigger chains of innovation. Schumpeter recognized that promising new products and nascent economies often carried the seeds of their own impermanence, destined to evolve or fade as markets shifted. In cannabis, though, consolidation and decay came surprisingly fast.
Take Tilray, once the darling of Canada’s legalization story. The company’s 2018 IPO was historic: the first cannabis stock to trade on NASDAQ. Its valuation ballooned to over eleven figures at its peak. Today, it is worth a fraction of that, below the $1 billion mark. Imagine the losses. CEOs tend to act as though they do not care, as if the physical business were detached from the speculative financial sphere. But those depreciations have real consequences. Then they make deep cuts to operations to satisfy the …
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Author: Rolando García / High Times
