Delaware Predicted $281 Million in Weed Sales. Year One Came In at $53 Million.

A little after 9 on the morning of August 1, 2025, James Giroud stood at a touch screen inside Field Supply, a dispensary in a shopping center west of Wilmington, and made the first legal recreational cannabis purchase of his 70 years. A retired warehouse manager who lived about two miles away, he had waited through more than two years of Delaware's stop-and-start rollout for the moment. A budtender named Lex Meisenzahl walked him toward a strain called Papaya Bomb. 'Just here to get a little buzz and it's legal,' Giroud said. 'I've been waiting for this day for a long time.' (S10)

Within the first half hour, dozens more followed him in. The store's owner, James Brobyn, had filled about 30 online orders before the doors opened. Down in Rehoboth Beach and across New Castle County's five open stores, the scene repeated. Around 9:30, the state's marijuana commissioner, Joshua Sanderlin, arrived at Field Supply mid-rounds. 'Today is the beginning of something very big in Delaware,' he said. (S10)

One year later, the state closed the ledger on that beginning. Delaware's adult-use retailers sold $53.4 million in cannabis between August 1, 2025 and August 1, 2026, generating about $8 million in tax at the state's 15% rate. It is a real market, opened after a decade of political fights. It is also roughly one-fifth of what Delaware's own first marijuana commissioner told the state to expect. (S1, S2)

That commissioner was Robert Coupe, and his résumé is the reason his number carried weight. Coupe spent nearly 30 years in the Delaware State Police, rising to superintendent, then served as the state's secretary of safety and homeland security, chief of staff to the attorney general, and head of its technology department. When Governor John Carney, who had vetoed legalization in 2022 and let it become law in 2023 only by declining to sign it, needed a first regulator in June 2023, he chose the state's former top cop. Coupe predicted Delaware would reach $281 million in annual sales and $42 million in yearly taxes. (S9, S12, S5)

Coupe never ran the market he forecast. In January 2025, after about 18 months preparing the market and as Governor Matt Meyer took office, he resigned. The launch followed that August. 'As a state, I think we have a responsibility to regulate it and to give our citizens the opportunity to purchase it legally,' he said on the way out. His deputy ran the office until Meyer nominated a successor with the opposite background: Joshua Sanderlin, a cannabis attorney and lobbyist who had founded a Washington firm advising the industry Coupe had policed. The state Senate confirmed him in May 2025. (S13, S8)

Sanderlin inherited both the launch and the projection, and he has spent a year putting distance between himself and the latter. 'It's really hard to say, looking prospectively, what a market will do,' he told WHYY in March, when seven-month sales stood at $29.3 million. 'You're really kind of shooting in the dark until you see it roll out. Again, our market's not fully rolled out.' (S5)

The incomplete rollout is his central argument, and the numbers support part of it. Delaware launched adult-use sales only at existing medical dispensaries. WHYY reported 13 converted medical stores in March 2026, each of which paid $100,000 for a conversion license. As of March 2026, the lottery-won retail-only shops intended to broaden the market were still on the runway. Delaware selected 125 license winners from more than 1,200 applicants in lotteries in late 2024, but as of March 2026 not a single lottery retail store had opened, despite 16 conditional retail licenses granted against a statutory cap of 30. (S3, S5, S4)

The delays were not all bureaucratic accident. An FBI fingerprinting and background-check holdup pushed the launch past its spring 2025 target. Many Delaware towns, including the beach destinations that swell with summer visitors, banned cannabis businesses or zoned them to the margins. Until the General Assembly passed Senate Bill 75, counties could deny permits to license holders outright. The state built its market incumbent-first and town-by-town, and the sales figures reflect a market still missing most of its stores. (S2, S3, S13)

The price competition starts at the state line. WHYY reported Delaware's population as 1.06 million, Maryland's as 6.26 million and New Jersey's as 9.55 million. Maryland averaged $79.3 million in monthly adult-use sales over the six months ending January 2026; New Jersey averaged $96.2 million over the six months ending September 2025. Delaware averaged $4.2 million over its first seven months. The roughly 19-to-one and 23-to-one comparisons are total sales, before population adjustment. Using the reported populations gives about 3.2 times and 2.5 times Delaware's sales per resident, respectively. These are comparisons across different reporting periods. (S5)

The reason Delawareans cross those lines is price, and price is a function of supply. Delaware retailers can only sell cannabis grown, processed, and tested inside Delaware, and in year one there was not much of it: 3 of 47 conditional cultivators and 1 of 20 conditional manufacturers were operating as of March. Zoë Patchell, who leads the Delaware Cannabis Advocacy Network, pointed to a specific product, Betty's Eddies edibles that cost roughly half as much across the Maryland line. 'Consumers aren't stupid,' she said, 'and it's easy to see what the going rate for cannabis is.' (S5)

The March price comparison made the gap visible on the shelf. A five-pack of Betty's Eddies 'Smashin' Passion' chews cost about $20.70 with tax in Delaware; a ten-pack of the identical product, twice the candy, sold for roughly $22.40 with Baltimore's lower 12% tax across the line. In that comparison, a Delaware buyer who drove 40 minutes could get double the product for $1.70 more. (S5)

“It really is supply dependent. But you can't magically increase supply to lower prices until there's more suppliers. And that takes time. It just does.”

— James Brobyn, Owner, Field Supply

Brobyn, who ran the Delaware Cannabis Industry Association until early this year, does not dispute the diagnosis. 'It really is supply dependent,' he said in March. 'You can't magically increase supply to lower prices until there's more suppliers. And that takes time.' It is the same point Sanderlin makes from the regulator's chair, that the fix is more growers, more processors, more stores, arriving at a market that is bigger, not a projection that was wrong. (S5)

There is also a case that $53.4 million undersells Delaware's legal cannabis economy. The medical market did not vanish when adult-use opened; patients spent $43.1 million in just the seven months after launch, a pace near $74 million a year. Counted together, Delawareans bought well over $90 million of legal cannabis in year one. The adult-use number is low. The total is less so. (S5)

Delaware's launch was also shadowed by the problem that has trailed nearly every social-equity program in the country. In April, MJBizDaily reported that state regulators had rejected at least 19 social-equity applications tied to a single Arizona consulting firm, Cannabis Business Advisors, run by an investor named Michael Halow. Its contracts charged applicants $10,000 a month before opening, then $50,000 rising to $75,000 a month after, plus a $1 million break-up fee, terms the marijuana office called structured so a takeover 'is inevitable.' Brobyn called it 'the worst form of predatory stuff you could think of.' (S11, S5)

Against that, the state's own framing is one of steady progress. At the anniversary, Sanderlin's office counted 38 lottery-won businesses, cultivators, manufacturers, retailers, and a lab, active or preparing to open, and nine Social Equity Financial Assistance grants worth more than $1 million, with $341,250 already paid out. 'The growers are the foundation of the entire marketplace,' Sanderlin said. 'Without our growers we have no product, without product we have no market.' (S6, S2)

For all the shortfall, the year did what its architects most wanted: it moved buyers into stores. Randolph Kellett, an electrician, walked out of Field Supply on launch day with a quarter-ounce of Papaya Bomb and a pre-roll. 'I can come in here like a gentleman,' he said, 'and ask for what I need and get what I want and pay with the money that I have and walk out of here legally.' Sherri Koehler, who ran retail for Columbia Care's Rehoboth Beach store, said by September that locals no longer had to cross state lines. (S10, S4)

Whether they stop crossing is the question year two will answer, and it is a question about arithmetic more than enthusiasm. The MJBiz Factbook projected at launch that Delaware could reach $160 million in sales by the end of 2026, above the actual pace, below Coupe's $281 million, and dependent on further retail openings and more competitively priced in-state supply. (S4)

James Giroud got what he waited two years for on a Friday morning last August: a legal store, a strain named Papaya Bomb, and a receipt. The March price comparison shows the challenge for Delaware: giving buyers like him a reason to keep their next purchase at home.

Correction (September 8, 2026): The original article mislabeled total-sales multiples as population-adjusted and gave New Jersey the wrong reporting period. The comparison now includes the correct periods and per-capita arithmetic. The 13-store statistic and price comparison are dated to March 2026, the price difference is corrected to $1.70, and the resignation-to-launch timeline is clarified.

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