Medical marijuana sales began in Ohio on January 14, 2019. In the years since, Akron and its Summit County neighbors have seen a steady build-out of dispensaries, cultivation, processing, and a widening web of support services such as security, HVAC, packaging, and analytics. State sales ledgers show a medical market that surpassed $1.9 billion in cumulative product sales by August 2024—before adult-use launched—illustrating a significant and sustained new industry base that predated recreational revenue.
At street level, Akron now hosts multiple storefronts and related facilities—Bloom on East North Street, The Botanist downtown, and Culture Cannabis Club on Archwood. These businesses anchor foot traffic, create retail jobs, and repurpose commercial real estate. City planning records and local reporting also document a wave of “dual-use” permits that allowed existing medical operators to serve adult-use customers, indicative of investment in inventory, staffing, compliance, and tenant improvements that began during the medical era and accelerated later.
Taxation underscores the economic footprint. Unlike in many states, Ohio applies standard state and local sales tax to medical marijuana. In Summit County—and therefore Akron—the combined sales tax rate is 6.75 percent. That revenue flows through routine sales-tax channels to the state and county, supporting general operations. Adult-use carries an additional 10 percent excise managed by the state, but the medical market alone created a steady baseline of taxable sales.
On top of sales-tax effects, the medical industry seeded payrolls. Early facilities like Calyx Peak’s Akron cultivation site projected two to three dozen jobs at launch. As the sector matured, national labor analyses estimated hundreds of thousands of cannabis jobs nationwide, with Ohio poised for sizable gains. Akron reflected that trend with a persistent mix of packaging, extraction, and retail positions advertised locally, demonstrating that medical legalization was more than symbolic—it was an economic engine.
City finance files provide a window into fiscal expectations. Akron’s finance director told council in March 2025 the city recorded $1.25 million in marijuana-related revenues for FY2024 on the advice of the state auditor. While those particular dollars relate to the adult-use excise pool still awaiting state distribution, the operational base generating them—dispensaries, growers, and processors—was built during the medical regime. The mayor called the industry a “net positive,” citing multiple local growing facilities employing “dozens of workers.”
At the state level, the Division of Cannabis Control’s sales reports show the medical market established stable throughput—inventory, manufacturing, and patient demand—long before adult-use volumes began in August 2024. Analysts now estimate Ohio’s combined market will exceed $1 billion annually, but that scaling rests on infrastructure created for medical access: licensed labs, trained pharmacists at dispensaries, compliance systems, and in-state supply that kept spending and payroll local rather than across the border.
There are caveats. Regulatory debate in Columbus over how to allocate adult-use excise and whether to increase tax rates creates uncertainty for municipalities building budgets around cannabis. Higher rates could also tug on price-sensitive demand and compress margins—pressures that would radiate back into hiring and capital spending, including in Akron’s warehouse districts. Still, the evidence suggests medical legalization laid the economic scaffolding—sales-tax streams, payrolls, and property reinvestment—that positioned Akron and its suburbs to capture broader cannabis-sector gains.