Tony Wang14 min readMedical-Only Oklahoma Has More Dispensaries Per Capita Than California
We mapped 11,469 US cannabis dispensaries. Medical-only Oklahoma beats nearly every recreational-legal state — legal status barely predicts store density.
Cannabis coverage almost always frames legal status as the headline variable: recreational versus medical versus illegal. That framing turns out to explain much less than expected once you actually map where the stores are. A state's specific licensing rules — how many licenses, what qualifies, whether there's a cap — matter far more than which broad legal category the state falls into.
Oklahoma's medical program out-densities almost every recreational state
| Rank | State | Listings | Per 100k residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Montana | 408 | 36.36 |
| 2 | Maine | 502 | 36.24 |
| 3 | District of Columbia | 129 | 18.37 |
| 4 | Alaska | 117 | 15.95 |
| 5 | Vermont | 101 | 15.57 |
| 6 | New Mexico | 315 | 14.79 |
| 7 | Colorado | 664 | 11.04 |
| 8 | Michigan | 877 | 8.65 |
| 9 | Massachusetts | 420 | 5.89 |
| 10 | Washington | 366 | 4.60 |
| … | (9 states omitted) | ||
| 20 | Ohio | 231 | 1.94 |
| 21 | Delaware | 19 | 1.81 |
| 22 | Nevada | 53 | 1.62 |
| 23 | Rhode Island | 14 | 1.28 |
| 24 | Arizona | 50 | 0.66 |
Show all 24 recreational-legal states + DC
| Rank | State | Per 100k residents |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Montana | 36.36 |
| 2 | Maine | 36.24 |
| 3 | District of Columbia | 18.37 |
| 4 | Alaska | 15.95 |
| 5 | Vermont | 15.57 |
| 6 | New Mexico | 14.79 |
| 7 | Colorado | 11.04 |
| 8 | Michigan | 8.65 |
| 9 | Massachusetts | 5.89 |
| 10 | Washington | 4.60 |
| 11 | Missouri | 4.34 |
| 12 | New York | 4.20 |
| 13 | Oregon | 4.07 |
| 14 | New Jersey | 4.02 |
| 15 | Minnesota | 3.52 |
| 16 | Illinois | 2.47 |
| 17 | California | 2.44 |
| 18 | Connecticut | 2.15 |
| 19 | Maryland | 2.00 |
| 20 | Ohio | 1.94 |
| 21 | Delaware | 1.81 |
| 22 | Nevada | 1.62 |
| 23 | Rhode Island | 1.28 |
| 24 | Arizona | 0.66 |
Two things explain most of this table. First, Montana and Maine's outlier highs both trace to loose, long-running small-operator licensing (Maine's program dates to 1999 and historically allowed many small "caregiver"-scale sellers to convert into licensed retail; Montana's 2020 legalization let towns opt in individually with few caps). Second, California and Arizona's low ranks are the flip side of the same mechanism: California allows roughly 700 municipalities to ban retail cannabis outright even though it's legal statewide, and Arizona's recreational licenses are tied to a small, pre-existing pool of medical dispensary licenses — both are legal-on-paper states with deliberately scarce retail. Legal status sets the ceiling; licensing design sets the actual count.
Medical-only states, ranked
| Rank | State | Listings | Per 100k residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oklahoma | 905 | 22.10 |
| 2 | South Dakota | 67 | 7.25 |
| 3 | Mississippi | 162 | 5.50 |
| 4 | West Virginia | 80 | 4.52 |
| 5 | Nebraska | 75 | 3.74 |
| 6 | Florida | 814 | 3.48 |
| 7 | Pennsylvania | 258 | 1.97 |
| 8 | Arkansas | 45 | 1.46 |
| 9 | Texas | 390 | 1.25 |
| 10 | New Hampshire | 17 | 1.21 |
| 11 | North Dakota | 7 | 0.88 |
| 12 | Louisiana | 37 | 0.80 |
| 13 | Alabama | 22 | 0.43 |
| 14 | Hawaii | 6 | 0.42 |
| 15 | Utah | 6 | 0.17 |
Florida's 814 raw listings and 3.48 per-100k rate is itself a real story: Florida runs one of the country's largest medical-only markets under a license-capped "Medical Marijuana Treatment Center" system — each of roughly 28 licensed operators is allowed to run many locations under one license, which is why the raw count is large (814, more than all but 4 states in this entire dataset) even though the per-capita rate lands mid-table once divided by Florida's 23.4 million residents.
Michigan: the market cannabis trade press describes isn't what's on the map
| Chain | Share of a 300-record Michigan sample |
|---|---|
| Lume | 6.3% |
| Jars Cannabis | 4.0% |
| Pure Options | 2.3% |
| House of Dank | 2.3% |
| Smilez | 2.3% |
| Skymint | 2.0% |
| Exclusive | 1.7% |
| Timber Cannabis Co. | 1.7% |
| Top 8 Michigan-based chains combined | 22.6% |
| National MSOs (Trulieve, Curaleaf, Verano, Cresco) | 0.0% (0 hits) |
Multi-state operators (MSOs) — Trulieve, Curaleaf, Green Thumb Industries, Verano, Cresco Labs — are the dominant subject of national cannabis trade coverage, and several of them do operate under multiple state-specific brand names (Verano's dispensaries trade as "Zen Leaf" in most states but "MÜV" in Florida; Cresco Labs' retail brand is "Sunnyside"; Columbia Care rebranded its dispensaries entirely to "Cannabist," which we found live in our West Virginia sample). But in Michigan specifically — one of the largest and most mature recreational markets in the country — none of the major MSOs showed up at all in a 300-record sample. The largest single chain, Lume, is a Michigan-founded, Michigan-focused company at just 6.3%. This doesn't mean MSOs have no Michigan presence at all, but it does mean they aren't the dominant visible force in the state's day-to-day retail landscape the way national coverage of the industry might suggest — Michigan's specific licensing history favored in-state operators, and the map reflects that.
The hemp loophole: dispensary-branded stores in states with no legal cannabis
| State | cannabis_store listings | Real legal status |
|---|---|---|
| North Carolina | 296 | CBD oil only, no THC program |
| Tennessee | 153 | Low-THC cannabis oil only |
| Wisconsin | 133 | CBD oil only |
| Georgia | 61 | Low-THC oil only (up to 5% THC) |
| Indiana | 41 | CBD oil only |
| South Carolina | 38 | Low-THC cannabis oil only |
| Kentucky | 38 | Low-THC oil only |
| Kansas | 35 | 0% THC CBD oil only |
| Iowa | 12 | Very limited low-THC program |
| Wyoming | 0 | CBD oil only |
| Idaho | 0 | CBD oil under 0.1% THC only |
North Carolina's 296 is by far the largest of these — worth flagging explicitly, since a naive per-capita ranking that didn't check legal status first would have placed North Carolina in the middle of the national pack. Every one of these 807 listings is either a hemp/CBD product shop, a business we haven't individually verified, or (rarely) a data mistag — none reflects a real, licensed marijuana dispensary, because none of these 11 states has a program capable of licensing one.
How we did this, and the caveats
Every number above comes from a live search/facets call against Crawlora's Google Maps business dataset, 2026-08-27 snapshot, cross-referenced against Wikipedia's "Legality of cannabis by U.S. jurisdiction" article and US Census Bureau Vintage 2025 (July 1, 2025) state population estimates.
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Per-capita rankings | category=cannabis_store, 11,469 US listings, split into 3 groups by verified legal status (24 recreational-legal states + DC, 15 medical-only states with real dispensary programs, 11 CBD-only/no-program states) |
| Legal-status verification | Read Wikipedia's full state-by-state table directly rather than trusting a summary — this caught several states an initial research pass had misclassified as "medical-only" when their actual medical allowance is CBD-oil-only |
| Sample verification | Colorado (6/6 clean), Oklahoma (6/6 clean), Idaho (0/3 genuine), Texas (1 confirmed licensed + several likely hemp shops), West Virginia (6/6 clean) |
| Chain-penetration | 300-record Michigan sample (has_website=true, sort=updated_at_desc, deduplicated), classified by website domain |
Caveats worth stating plainly: Texas's and other narrow-medical-program states' raw counts are not corrected for hemp-shop contamination — we flagged it via direct sampling rather than attempting a full domain-by-domain reclassification across all 390 Texas listings, so treat Texas's 1.25-per-100k figure as an overestimate of its real medical dispensary density. Utah's count is understated for the category-tagging reason explained above, and we did not attempt a full correction. This measures physical retail locations, not sales volume, license count, or company revenue — Florida's capped-license model in particular means a small number of companies can run many mapped locations each, which this location-count method can't distinguish from a market with many independent operators. DC's cannabis market operates under an unusual "gifting" model due to a long-standing congressional appropriations rider blocking commercial retail sales, which may affect how its listings compare to states with ordinary commercial dispensaries. And as with every study on this dataset: it's live-growing and state cannabis policy itself changes quickly, so a re-pull months from now will show different totals and possibly different legal classifications.
If you want to run your own consolidation or density checks on this data, that's exactly what Crawlora's Google Maps business API is for — the same structured-data approach behind our liquor retail density, bank branch density, and church density studies.
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Frequently asked questions
Which US state has the most cannabis dispensaries per capita?
Montana leads at 36.36 dispensaries per 100,000 residents, followed by Maine at 36.24. Medical-only Oklahoma, at 22.10 per 100k, would rank 3rd if placed alongside the 24 fully recreational-legal states — ahead of California (2.44), New York (4.20), Illinois (2.47), and every other recreational state except Montana and Maine.
Does recreational marijuana legalization predict how many dispensaries a state has?
Much less than expected. Medical-only Oklahoma, with no recreational program at all, has more dispensaries per capita than 22 of the 24 fully recreational-legal states. What actually predicts density is licensing looseness — no qualifying-condition requirement and no license cap in Oklahoma's case — not whether a program is labeled medical or recreational. Capped-license recreational states like Arizona (0.66 per 100k) stay near the bottom despite full legal status.
Do national multi-state cannabis operators (MSOs) dominate every state's dispensary market?
Not in Michigan, one of the largest recreational markets we checked. A 300-record sample found the top chain, Lume, at just 6.3% — a Michigan-founded company, not a national MSO. Trulieve, Curaleaf, Verano, and Cresco Labs, the operators most covered in national cannabis trade press, had zero hits in the sample. Michigan's specific licensing history favored in-state operators over the multi-state chains that dominate coverage of the industry nationally.
Are all Google Maps 'cannabis store' listings real marijuana dispensaries?
No. The category also picks up hemp-derived product shops (Delta-8, CBD) that have been federally legal nationwide since the 2018 Farm Bill, regardless of a state's marijuana laws. We verified this directly: Idaho, which has no real cannabis program, showed 0 of 3 sampled listings as genuine dispensaries. 11 states with no comprehensive medical or recreational program still show 807 combined 'cannabis_store'-tagged listings nationally, led by North Carolina at 296 — almost certainly hemp/CBD shops using dispensary-style branding, not licensed marijuana retailers.
Why does Utah show only 6 cannabis dispensary listings despite having a real medical program?
Because Utah's medical cannabis retailers are legally designated 'medical cannabis pharmacies,' and at least some are tagged under Google's generic pharmacy category instead of cannabis_store. We confirmed one example, Dragonfly Wellness, sitting in category=pharmacy alongside ordinary CVS and Walgreens locations. This is the third time in this data series that a Utah-specific business type has turned out to be hiding under a generic category label, following the same pattern found with Utah's LDS churches and its state liquor stores.