New Mexico Cannabis Sales Have Been Flat For Three Years. The Texas Border Is Where All The Growth Went.

We pulled every monthly sales report the New Mexico Cannabis Control Division has published since adult-use sales began, 52 files covering April 2022 through July 2026, and combined them into a single dataset. It comes to $2.41 billion across 102 cities.

Three things stand out, and the biggest one is not what most people assume.

New Mexico's cannabis market stopped growing in 2023

Monthly statewide sales were around $40 million in 2022. They are around $48 million now. But almost all of that increase happened in the first year. Since the middle of 2023 the number has moved between roughly $44 million and $52 million with no real trend, month after month, for three years.

That is a mature market, not a growing one.

Albuquerque is smaller than it was at launch

In April 2022, the first month of adult-use sales, Albuquerque did $14,915,471.

In July 2026 it did $14,537,823.

Four years later, the state's largest market is doing slightly less business than it did in its first month, without adjusting for inflation. Adjust for inflation and the decline is considerable.

Meanwhile, Sunland Park

Sunland Park has a population of roughly 17,000 people. It sits on the Texas border, a short drive from El Paso, a metro area of about 870,000 people in a state where cannabis is not legal.

In April 2022, Sunland Park accounted for 3.5 percent of all cannabis sold in New Mexico.

In July 2026 it accounted for 11.5 percent. It is the second largest cannabis market in the state, behind only Albuquerque, a city thirty times its size.

The clearest evidence of who is actually shopping there is the medical split. Statewide, medical cannabis is about 21 percent of sales. In Sunland Park it is 4 percent. Nearly everything sold there is adult-use, which is what you would expect from customers who cannot hold a New Mexico medical card because they do not live in New Mexico.

It is not just Sunland Park

Group the border-adjacent cities together, Sunland Park, Chaparral, Anthony, Santa Teresa, Jal, Hobbs, Texico, Clovis, Vado and Mesilla, and the pattern is unmistakable.

Border towns have gone from roughly one dollar in nine to more than one dollar in four of every cannabis dollar spent in New Mexico. In a flat market, that growth came from somewhere, and the somewhere appears to be everywhere else.

Medical is collapsing

One more trend worth noting. Medical cannabis was 44 percent of New Mexico sales in April 2022. It is 21 percent now, and the decline has been steady almost every single month for four years. Patients have been converting to the adult-use market rather than renewing cards.

What this suggests

New Mexico did not really build a $2.4 billion in-state cannabis market. It built a roughly flat in-state market and a large, fast-growing export business that is legally structured as retail, sitting along a border with a state of 31 million people where cannabis remains illegal.

That has an obvious implication. If Texas ever legalizes, a quarter of New Mexico's cannabis economy is exposed, and the towns most exposed are the small ones that have the least ability to absorb it.

About this data

Every figure here comes from the Cannabis Control Division's published monthly "Market Sales by City" files, available at crop.rld.nm.gov. We combined 52 monthly files, normalized city names where the state published inconsistent spellings, and verified that every row's medical and adult-use figures sum to its stated total. Our dataset is available on our sales page and free to use with attribution.

Population figures are approximate. Sales figures are exact as published by the state.