North Dakota Cannabis Market Analysis: Two Producers, Eight Stores, ~11% Capture — and the Last Annual Report North Dakota Will Ever Require

North Dakota's medical marijuana program sold $22.4 million in fiscal year 2024 through eight dispensaries supplied by exactly two manufacturers — the maximums state law permits without a regulatory finding that has never been made. Under the framework's assumptions, the legal channel captures roughly 11% of modeled resident demand in dollar terms and a mid-single-digit share of modeled consumption, because those dollars buy fewer grams at duopoly prices: a July 2026 menu audit shows median flower near 19% labeled THC at a $12.50-per-gram bulk floor, roughly 2.7 times a sampled Florida retailer's price per labeled milligram of THC. And this is the program's final required annual report — 2025 legislation repealed the reporting mandate that produced it.

Market Overview

North Dakota voters approved the Compassionate Care Act in November 2016. In January 2017, the Legislative Assembly suspended it, replacing the voter-initiated framework with its own statute that April. The replacement capped the market's structure in law: no more than two manufacturing facilities and no more than eight dispensaries, unless the Department of Health and Human Services determines additional entities are necessary to increase patient access. Both escape clauses have existed for nine years. Neither has ever been exercised.

The two manufacturers are Grassroots Cannabis in Fargo (a Curaleaf entity, legal name GR Vending ND, LLC) and Pure Dakota, LLC in Bismarck. Of the eight dispensaries, four are Curaleaf locations and three are Pure Dakota Health — one multistate operator controls one of the state's two supply licenses and half its retail doors.

Key metrics (FY2024, per the program's final required annual report):

• Sales: $22.42M (fiscal year ending June 30, 2024)
• Registered qualifying patients: 9,934, up 338 from the prior year (+3.5%)
• Dispensaries: 8; manufacturers: 2 — both at their statutory caps
• Flower share of sales: 62%, down from a 72% peak in FY2021
• Certifying providers: approximately 358 per the report's fiscal-year-end chart, which the report describes as essentially unchanged from FY2023
• Top qualifying condition: anxiety disorder — 6,318 of 15,787 condition selections (40%), ahead of PTSD; North Dakota is the only state in this series where chronic pain is not first
• Purchase limits: 2.5 ounces of dried flower per 30 days (enhanced amounts for cancer patients) — about 2.36 grams per day, more than double the framework's 1.0 gram baseline — plus a separate 6,000mg-THC limit per 30 days for concentrates and products. The flower allotment is not this program's binding constraint.
• Program finances: $623,275 in fee revenue against $930,257 in expenses in FY2024

Revenue Trend

Triple-digit growth in year two, single digits by year five; patient registration follows the same curve (707 → 9,934, with just 338 added in FY2024). HHS's program page listed 10,297 cards issued as of July 9, 2026 — the market appears to have plateaued near 10,000 patients and $22–23 million. With per-patient spending effectively constant across the last two reported years (~$2,250), the card count implies an annualized run rate near $23 million — an extrapolation that is now the only revenue estimate anyone can produce, since the data that would confirm it is no longer required to exist.

The Potency and Pricing Audit

Because North Dakota publishes no price data, this analysis includes a menu audit conducted July 19, 2026, covering all listed flower strains at the two North Dakota dispensary operators with the most locations (111 listings combined) and, for comparison, one large Florida medical retailer's menu (52 listings). Each listing is a distinct strain; CBD-dominant ratio products were excluded; potency figures are label THC as displayed on the menus.

• North Dakota (n=111): mean 19.4% labeled THC, median approximately 19%, range 11.2–28.6%. Fifty-nine percent of listings test under 20%.
• Florida sample (n=52): mean 28.7%, median 29%, minimum 21%. Not a single listing under 20%.
• The strongest flower in the audited North Dakota menus — 28.6% — would rank below the median listing on the sampled Florida menu, and 56% of that menu's listings exceed it.
• The two North Dakota producers differ by about one point (means of 19.8% and 18.7%) — practically indistinguishable. This is not one weak cultivator; it is the sampled assortment of the entire supply base.

Pricing follows a rigid ladder: $350 per ounce ($12.50/g), $145–180 per half, $100 per quarter, single grams commonly at $17 — nothing structurally under $10 per gram outside promotions. At the deepest bulk tier and median potency, a North Dakota patient pays roughly $0.064 per labeled milligram of THC; the sampled Florida menu offered 30% flower at $25 per eighth, about $0.024 per milligram. Roughly 2.7 times the effective sticker price, at maximum bulk, between two medical programs under identical federal law. One licenses producers by open application; the other wrote the number two into statute.

This is the structural signature documented in Louisiana — a two-producer statute, elevated prices, a capture ceiling — with the audit adding menu-level evidence the Louisiana data could not show: pricing and potency profiles consistent with a market in which restricted supplier entry removes the competitive pressure to improve either — the pressure the statute was written to exclude.

Tax Structure

North Dakota applies its 5% state sales tax, plus local sales taxes, to medical marijuana purchases — the prescription-drug exemption does not apply — with no cannabis-specific excise tax. Because the state's income tax begins from federal taxable income, Section 280E historically flowed through to state returns; the April 2026 federal rescheduling of state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III removes that burden for exactly the license class North Dakota permits.

Total Addressable Market

Using the framework's assumptions — a 21-and-over population of approximately 580,000 (Census population estimates of 799,358 with 22.9% under 18, less an estimated 36,000-person 18–20 cohort from ACS age distributions), 18% participation, 1.0 gram per day, and the normalized $5.50 per gram used across this series — resident demand is roughly 104,000 consumers, 38 million grams, and a $210 million market annually.

Against $22.4 million in reported sales, dollar capture is approximately 11%. That figure flatters the program, because it is denominated in duopoly retail prices: dollar capture answers what share of cannabis spending is legal, and at more than double the normalized price it diverges sharply from the share of cannabis consumed. The state publishes no volume data, so consumption capture must be estimated. Flower was 62% of FY2024 sales — about $13.9 million — which at the audited $12.50–13 bulk price implies roughly 1.1 million flower grams; converting the remaining 38% of sales at THC equivalence adds on the order of half a million flower-equivalent grams. Call it 1.5–1.8 million legal grams against 38 million modeled: a consumption share in the mid-single digits, sensitive to product-mix and pricing assumptions, but difficult to push above 6% under any of them. The per-patient view points the same direction: $2,257 per patient per year is Arkansas-tier spending, yet at North Dakota prices it buys roughly 15 grams a month where Mississippi's $6.43 flower turns $175 into 27. In dollars, North Dakota is Hawaii-tier. In grams, it is closer to Virginia. Only about 9.5% of the state's modeled consumers hold a card at all — and the volume data that could check any of these estimates is a gap the repeal of the reporting mandate now makes permanent.

Dispensary Density

Eight dispensaries for roughly 580,000 adults is approximately 1.4 stores per 100,000. The statute's eight 50-mile regions distribute them rationally — Cass, Burleigh, and Ward counties hold roughly half the registry and all have stores. The problem is not placement. It is that the number eight, like the number two, is written into law with an administrative escape hatch that has never opened.

Medical-only programs; capture figures are dollar-basis modeled estimates under standardized framework assumptions. North Dakota's modeled consumption share runs in the mid-single digits as derived above.

The 2025 Session: Square Lozenges and a Dead Data Series

The 2025 Legislative Assembly loosened the program in genuinely meaningful ways, effective August 1, 2025: telehealth for the initial certification visit, two-year patient cards, and — in a wrinkle with regional implications — 60-day cards for nonresidents.

The same session finally legalized edibles, and the statutory specification deserves quotation rather than paraphrase: a cannabinoid edible product must be "a soft or hard lozenge in a geometric square shape," capped at 5mg THC per serving and 50mg per package. Six years into the program, North Dakota patients gained access to one edible geometry.

And then the session turned off the lights — almost absentmindedly. Senate Bill 2308, an omnibus boards-consolidation measure that dissolved more than a dozen advisory bodies — from the brain injury advisory council to the poet laureate nominating board — eliminated the Medical Marijuana Advisory Board and, with it, the statutory annual-report requirement. The data series did not die because anyone argued for hiding it; it died because nobody valued it enough to carve it out of a paperwork-reduction bill. The FY2024 report cited throughout this analysis is the final annual report the state is required to produce — the archived series is already stamped "maintained for historical, research, or recordkeeping purposes only" — and while HHS continues to post limited current figures such as active card counts, the comprehensive sales, product-mix, and provider data end here.

Home Cultivation

Not permitted. The voter-approved 2016 measure allowed qualifying patients living more than 40 miles from a compassion center to grow up to eight plants; the legislature's 2017 replacement removed the provision, and it has never returned.

The prohibition is worth examining on the duopoly's own terms, because North Dakota is one of the strongest possible test cases for home cultivation as a commercial threat — the highest sampled THC prices in this dataset, eight stores, and an audited flower ceiling of 28.6%. If home growing were ever going to displace dispensary revenue, it would be here. It would not. The full cost accounting of home cultivation — equipment, consumables, failure rates, and the space cost every grow guide omits — runs $815–1,937 per pound, economically neutral at typical consumption, and fewer than 5% of consumers grow their own even where it is fully legal. The ban does not protect the duopoly's revenue in any measurable way. What it forecloses are the non-economic motives that drive the few who do grow — quality control and reliable access — which is to say, the two things this market conspicuously fails to provide.

The Bottom Line

North Dakota voters have rejected adult-use legalization three times — 2018, 2022, and 2024. What those votes preserve is this: a statutory duopoly selling the weakest sampled flower in this dataset at the highest sampled prices, to fewer than one in ten of the state's estimated cannabis consumers, while — under the framework's assumptions — roughly 95% of modeled consumption moves through channels North Dakota neither taxes nor tests.

The fiscal stakes were understated by everyone involved in the 2024 fight. Measure 5 created no cannabis-specific excise tax, and the official fiscal analysis modeled revenue from the existing 5% state sales tax: the Tax Commissioner estimated $7.28 million for the 2025–27 biennium — about $3.6 million a year — while the measure sponsor's own extrapolations ran from a $7.65 million annual low to a $19.5 million average. Run the framework's demand model instead: 104,000 consumers at 1.0 gram per day and a $6.00 value price is a $229 million retail market at full displacement — roughly $11.4 million per year in state sales tax, or $22.9 million per biennium against the fiscal note's approved $10.2 million biennial revenue line. That is a mature-market scenario, not a first-biennium forecast, but the gap in implied assumptions is the point: backed out at the 5% rate, the Tax Commissioner's estimate assumes the legal market never captures a third of consumption, and even the sponsor's low case assumes two-thirds. The mature scenario is not hypothetical — Montana, with 870,000 adults and similar politics, runs ~107% modeled dollar capture, reflecting full displacement plus tourism inflow, next door. Nobody at the hearing priced in success.

Schedule III's 280E relief flows precisely to state-licensed medical operators — the only license class North Dakota permits — making this capped, two-producer market one of the more federally advantaged structures in the region on paper. Whether that advantage ever translates into lower prices, better flower, or broader capture is a question annual data would have answered. As of August 2025, no law requires North Dakota to answer it.

This analysis applies the Dan K Reports Cannabis Market Framework. For methodology, assumptions, and the complete state-by-state comparison, see the framework documentation.