At a glance
Where the market is heading
Rhode Island's compassion centres have sold to patients since 2013, but its transaction-level record begins on 1 December 2022 — the day adult-use retail opened and the state switched to Metrc seed-to-sale tracking. Everything on this chart is summed from the Commission's own daily rows.
Monthly retail sales
Why the line starts where it does. The Commission's extract is the only public route to Rhode Island's granular history, and it does not reach back before Metrc. The months before it are drawn in What came before Metrc below, from a different publication on a different basis, and the two are never joined into one line.
The months at each end of the extract are not months. The extract begins and ends mid-month, and the Commission's own published view carries a filter that shows complete months only. This page applies the Commission's rule rather than one of its own, so a part-month never appears here as a full one.
Who is buying
The split is the Commission's own. Its workbook groups the transaction types it records into Adult-use and Medical-use, and this page reads that grouping out of the workbook rather than assuming it — so the medical share includes caregiver purchases and out-of-state patients, exactly as the Commission counts them.
Retail dollars by channel
What a gram cost
Rhode Island tracks most of what it sells by the item, not by weight, and an item is a package rather than an amount. One bud category carries ounces beside its dollars, and this line is that category alone — a real price for a real thing, and not the price of the average gram sold in Rhode Island.
Bud price per gram, weight-tracked bud only
This line is not on the cross-state price chart, and that is a decision rather than an omission. The estate's price standard is whole bud, and Rhode Island fails it twice over: the priced category is a minority of the state's own bud dollars, and nothing the Commission publishes says what that category contains. The state file records both as open questions and keeps the series local.
The larger bud category is sold by the package. Its dollars divided by its units give a price per package, which is a different thing from a price per gram, and converting one to the other would need a pack size nobody publishes. It is left out rather than estimated in.
Moving product between licensees
The Commission publishes wholesale in the same table as retail, separated by a single column, and defines it: “Unaffiliated transfers” means products sold from one licensed facility to another. For example, Cultivator to Compassion Center or Cultivator to Cultivator. None of it is in any retail figure on this page.
Unaffiliated wholesale transfers
Affiliated transfers are not drawn here at all. They are movements inside a vertically integrated licensee, and the Commission says of them: “Affiliated transfers do not typically have costs associated to them.” Almost every such row carries an empty dollar cell, so there is no series to draw; treating the blanks as zeroes would have published a figure the Commission does not.
What came before Metrc
Before Metrc, the Department of Business Regulation's Office of Cannabis Regulation published a monthly Industry Overview carrying a retail figure and a cultivator-to-compassion-centre figure. The Commission still hosts those editions, so the years before go-live are recoverable — on a basis the source never states.
Office of Cannabis Regulation monthly figures, to November 2022
These are not the same measurement as the chart above, and they are not merged with it. The Office of Cannabis Regulation printed a two-word column header and no definition, and the column's own arithmetic argues against reading it as a sum of retail transactions — the state file records what was measured and why it is an open question. It is published under the Commission's own column name, on its own basis, and it never reaches the cross-state charts.
The publication itself carries a disclaimer, and it is worth reading as one: “The Office of Cannabis Regulation is providing this aggregated data for public informational purposes only and is subject to ongoing correction.” It did correct itself between editions: the cultivator columns moved; the retail column moved too, once; the active patient count column never moved. The state file carries the count for each.
Registered patients
The Department of Health reported an active patient count to the Office of Cannabis Regulation, and the Industry Overview printed it. When that publication stopped, the machine-readable count stopped with it.
Active medical patients, to the end of the Industry Overview
The line ends because the publication did, not because the count did. The Cannabis Control Commission still publishes an active patient count — as quarterly chart images on its Active Patient Count page. Reading numbers off low-resolution pictures is not a source, so the page links the gallery instead of guessing at it.
The early gaps are the source's own. The Industry Overview says why: “Note that prior to July 2021, reported patient counts from RIDOH to OCR were intermittent and result in incomplete data for the period January 2020-June 2021.” Those months are drawn as holes, with that reason attached, rather than bridged.
Where these figures come from
Sourcing, basis and comparabilityRhode Island's medical programme has run through licensed compassion centres since 2013. Adult-use retail opened on 1 December 2022, at the same compassion centres and on the same day the state launched Metrc seed-to-sale tracking - so the granular sales history and the adult-use market begin together. Regulatory authority moved from the Department of Business Regulation's Office of Cannabis Regulation to the Cannabis Control Commission; the older DBR data page is gone and its replacement is a Tableau workbook.
Basis — Retail sales, Metrc daily rows
- Measurement
- measured
- Money
- unstated
- Tax
- unstated
- Period
- calendar_month
- Scope
- retail_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- medical, adult_use
The regulator's own words: The data provided summarizes activity in Rhode Island’s regulated cannabis market and other operational metrics.
Why an axis above reads unstated: Every artifact this pipeline reads was swept for basis language on 2026-08-16: 16 documents, 205,521 characters, covering the Commission's data hub, its pricing page, its patient-count page, the workbook XML, the published view CSV and the footnotes of all 11 Industry Overview editions. 'gross' returns 0 hits, 'discount' 0, 'excise' 0 and 'methodolog' 0. Nothing states whether these dollars are gross or net of discounts, and nothing states whether they include Rhode Island's sales tax or its cannabis excise. Both axes are unstated and neither is inferred from tax law. An undocumented basis is a gap to be labelled, never filled in with the most likely answer.
Basis — Unaffiliated wholesale transfers, Metrc daily rows
- Measurement
- measured
- Money
- unstated
- Tax
- unstated
- Period
- calendar_month
- Scope
- wholesale_only
- Geography
- statewide
The regulator's own words: "Unaffiliated transfers" means products sold from one licensed facility to another. For example, Cultivator to Compassion Center or Cultivator to Cultivator.
Why an axis above reads unstated: The same sweep as metrc_retail. The Commission defines what an unaffiliated transfer is and says nothing about what its dollar figure includes. An undocumented basis is a gap to be labelled, never filled in with the most likely answer.
Basis — Price per gram, Bud/Flower retail dollars over Bud/Flower retail ounces
- Measurement
- derived
- Money
- unstated
- Tax
- unstated
- Period
- calendar_month
- Scope
- retail_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- medical, adult_use
Why an axis above reads unstated: The same sweep as metrc_retail. 'bud' appears once across the 16 Commission artifacts this pipeline reads (205,521 characters) and never in a definition: the pricing page says the Commission's own charts cover the sale price for pre-packaged bud, and nothing anywhere states what the Metrc category Bud/Flower contains. An undocumented basis is a gap to be labelled, never filled in with the most likely answer.
Derivation. sum(DollarAmount) / (sum(QuantityOz) * 28.349523125) over retail rows with ProductCategory = 'Bud/Flower' Error: No estimate: both inputs are exact figures the Commission published and the only arithmetic is an ounce-to-gram conversion on a defined factor..
Unit conversion. oz → g, factor 28.349523125, defined in The international avoirdupois pound, 453.59237 g, divided by 16 ounces. ANCHORS 5 already converts DC's pounds with the same constant, so the two conversions cannot drift apart..
Basis — Retail Sales as printed by the Office of Cannabis Regulation, pre-Metrc
- Measurement
- unstated
- Money
- unstated
- Tax
- unstated
- Period
- calendar_month
- Scope
- retail_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- medical
The regulator's own words: (1) The Office of Cannabis Regulation is providing this aggregated data for public informational purposes only and is subject to ongoing correction. Any analyses or policy recommendations which utilize data contained herein by third-parties do not represent the views of the Department of Business Regulation.
Why an axis above reads unstated: The Industry Overview prints a two-word column header and two footnotes, neither about this column. The sweep across all 11 editions' footnotes and the Commission's pages returns no definition of it. Its measurement is left unstated because the column's own arithmetic argues against reading it as a sum of retail transactions: over 35 pre-Metrc months its greatest common divisor is exactly $25, while the cultivator dollar column printed beside it in the same table has a greatest common divisor of $1. See open question ocr_retail_column_basis. An undocumented basis is a gap to be labelled, never filled in with the most likely answer.
Basis — Cultivator-to-compassion-centre sales, Office of Cannabis Regulation
- Measurement
- unstated
- Money
- unstated
- Tax
- unstated
- Period
- calendar_month
- Scope
- wholesale_only
- Geography
- statewide
The regulator's own words: (1) The Office of Cannabis Regulation is providing this aggregated data for public informational purposes only and is subject to ongoing correction. Any analyses or policy recommendations which utilize data contained herein by third-parties do not represent the views of the Department of Business Regulation.
Why an axis above reads unstated: The same sweep. The column is labelled and never defined; unlike the retail column beside it, it carries its own internal check - the printed grams and pounds agree across all 36 rows to within 0.487 lb. An undocumented basis is a gap to be labelled, never filled in with the most likely answer.
Basis — Active patient count, RIDOH via the Office of Cannabis Regulation
- Measurement
- unstated
- Money
- not_applicable
- Tax
- not_applicable
- Period
- point_in_time
- Scope
- unstated
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- medical
The regulator's own words: (2) Note that prior to July 2021, reported patient counts from RIDOH to OCR were intermittent and result in incomplete data for the period January 2020-June 2021.
Why an axis above reads unstated: The Industry Overview says the counts are reported from RIDOH to OCR and that they were intermittent before July 2021. It does not say what date in the month the count is taken on, and the Commission's replacement chart images carry no methodology either, so the measurement and the scope are both unstated. An undocumented basis is a gap to be labelled, never filled in with the most likely answer.
Sources 3
| Role | Source | Format | From | Last verified | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canonical | Metrc Rhode Island - Public Cannabis Data (packaged Tableau workbook, Hyper extract) Rhode Island Cannabis Control Commission | tableau | 2022-10 | 2026-08-16 | The URL ends .twb and the bytes are a zip. Inside are the Hyper extract, the workbook XML and three logos. The extract holds 57,088 rows at daily grain from 2022-10-18 to 2026-08-01, of which 40,814 are retail sales and 16,274 are wholesale transfers. |
| Cross-check | Rhode Island Cannabis Data - the Commission's published Tableau view, CSV export Rhode Island Cannabis Control Commission | csv | rolling | 2026-08-16 | Never averaged with the canonical figure. 21 cells across 7 months of overlap; the largest disagreement is $0.50 at 2026-05/Adult-use, inside the half-dollar a whole-dollar rounding can produce. |
| Cross-check | Industry Overview (monthly PDF), Office of Cannabis Regulation Rhode Island Department of Business Regulation, Office of Cannabis Regulation, hosted by the Cannabis Control Commission | 2020-01 | 2026-08-16 | Never averaged with the canonical figure. OCR's contemporaneous total for 2022-12 is $7,395,989.00 against the extract's $7,521,300.06 - $125,311.06 lower, -1.67%. |
Why each marker above says what it says
| Metric | Marker | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Retail sales | Partly comparable | Measured from the Commission's own Metrc rows and summed by calendar month, which matches the anchor definition. What does not match is that Rhode Island never says whether these dollars are gross or net of discounts, or whether they include its sales tax and cannabis excise; both axes are unstated after a search of the 16 Commission artifacts this pipeline reads (205,521 characters). The series starts at 2022-12, the month Metrc went live - Rhode Island's medical market is a decade older than its transaction-level record of it. |
| Medical / adult-use split | Partly comparable | A genuine per-transaction split, taken from the Commission's own grouping of its own TransactionType column rather than from a licence attribute or a tax proxy. The caveat is what is inside the medical side: the Commission counts Caregiver, ExternalPatient, Patient as medical use, so out-of-state patients and caregiver purchases sit in the medical share where another state might separate them. Those rows are 2.48% of retail dollars. Both channels are open across the whole published series, so neither line has a pre-open gap. |
| Price per gram | Not like-for-like | Rhode Island tracks most retail categories by the item, not by weight. A price per gram can only be formed from Bud/Flower, which is 1.80% of the dollars the state takes across its two bud categories and 0.81% of all retail dollars; the larger bud category is sold by the package at $26.18 a unit, and ANCHORS 5 forbids converting a package price. Nothing the Commission publishes defines what Bud/Flower contains either, so the basket is unverified against the estate's whole-bud standard. DECISIONS Q7 excludes Rhode Island from the price chart for exactly this reason. The series is drawn on this page, labelled, and goes no further. Blocked until bud_flower_basket is resolved, whatever the status above says. |
| Per capita | Partly comparable | Inherits every flag on the numerator: unstated money basis, unstated tax basis, and a series that begins at Metrc go-live rather than at the start of the market. Rhode Island's own distortion is that the Commission counts out-of-state patients in its medical bin, so 2.46% of the dollars in the numerator were not paid by residents. |
| Patient counts | Partly comparable | The measure matches Maryland's - a point-in-time stock of active registrations, not a cumulative total and not a flow - so the two can share an axis. What cannot is the period: Rhode Island's machine-readable count ends at 2022-12, because the publication carrying it stopped and the Commission's replacement is a gallery of quarterly chart images. 14 earlier months are missing too, which the source explains as intermittent reporting rather than suppression. |
| Licence counts | Not like-for-like | Rhode Island publishes no machine-readable licence count. The extract carries a FacilityType column with 3 values - Compassion Center, Cultivator, Cultivator - Deliveries - but those are row labels on transactions, not a roster, and counting distinct labels would produce a number about the vocabulary rather than about the market. |
| Tax revenue | Not like-for-like | The Division of Revenue publishes a Quarterly Cannabis Tax Distribution Report covering the local 3% share by municipality, at an opaque /media/<id>/download path that is neither enumerable nor predictable, with a structural lag its own text describes as three months. It is a distribution of one of Rhode Island's three cannabis levies, not a receipts total, so it is not the tax_revenue metric other states join on. Nothing is ingested from it here. |
What is checked on every run 5
| Check | Kind | Last result |
|---|---|---|
| This pipeline's monthly aggregation of the extract against the Commission's own published aggregation of the same extract, cell by cell, for every month the published view covers. | cross source reconciliation | 21 cells across 7 months of overlap; the largest disagreement is $0.50 at 2026-05/Adult-use, inside the half-dollar a whole-dollar rounding can produce. |
| The Industry Overview prints cultivator transfers in grams and in pounds. The pair must agree, and it is the only internal arithmetic that table offers - it is what pins which columns belong to the cultivator block when the two-line header does not. | identity | 36 cultivator rows carry both grams and pounds; the largest disagreement between the printed pounds and grams divided by 453.59237 is 0.487 lb at 2021-07. |
| The Industry Overview's final row prints a medical line and a recreational line under one total, for the month Metrc went live. They must sum to it. | identity | OCR's own medical and recreational lines for 2022-12 sum to $7,395,988.77 against a printed total of $7,395,989.00, a residual of $0.23. |
| The one month both sources cover. They are not expected to agree: one is a contemporaneous return-based figure and the other is Metrc as it stands today, and the source itself warns that go-live data may be incomplete. | cross source reconciliation | OCR's contemporaneous total for 2022-12 is $7,395,989.00 against the extract's $7,521,300.06 - $125,311.06 lower, -1.67%. |
| Whether Rhode Island's retail dollars have an independent decomposition to be gated against. | unchecked | Not cross-checked. They do not. 44 months of retail dollars rest on one artifact. The Commission's own published view agrees with this pipeline's aggregation of it, which checks the arithmetic, not the underlying figures: both sides read the same 40,814 retail rows. Rhode Island publishes no second sales table, no county or municipal breakdown, and no tax series this pipeline can invert, so unlike DC - whose headline is over-determined by two identities in one document - this figure rests on one artifact and the page says so. |
The regulator's own notes, and what is still open
The regulator's own notes
The data provided summarizes activity in Rhode Island’s regulated cannabis market and other operational metrics.
— Rhode Island Cannabis Control Commission, Cannabis Industry Data
"Affiliated transfers" means the transfer of cannabis products in vertically integrated licensed Compassion Centers (licensed cannabis retail operations with their own licensed cannabis cultivations). Affiliated transfers do not typically have costs associated to them.
— Rhode Island Cannabis Control Commission, Cannabis Industry Data
"Unaffiliated transfers" means products sold from one licensed facility to another. For example, Cultivator to Compassion Center or Cultivator to Cultivator.
— Rhode Island Cannabis Control Commission, Cannabis Industry Data
On December 1, 2022 Rhode Island began the sale of cannabis to adult-use consumers and launched Metrc, our seed-to-sale tracking software.
— Office of Cannabis Regulation, Industry Overview Dec22, 2022-12
(1) The Office of Cannabis Regulation is providing this aggregated data for public informational purposes only and is subject to ongoing correction. Any analyses or policy recommendations which utilize data contained herein by third-parties do not represent the views of the Department of Business Regulation.
— Office of Cannabis Regulation, Industry Overview Dec22
(2) Note that prior to July 2021, reported patient counts from RIDOH to OCR were intermittent and result in incomplete data for the period January 2020-June 2021.
— Office of Cannabis Regulation, Industry Overview Dec22
The data provided summarizes retail cannabis pricing trends, including the sales price for pre-packaged bud and average price comparisons.
— Rhode Island Cannabis Control Commission, Pricing Data
The workbook carries its own complete-month rule as a Tableau filter, and this pipeline applies that rather than a policy of its own: [Date] <= DATE(DATEADD('day', -1, DATE(DATETRUNC('month', TODAY()))))
— Metrc Rhode Island - Public Cannabis Data, workbook XML
Open questions on this data
Unresolved definitional questions that gate something. Listed because a question nobody can see is a question nobody closes.
- What is the Office of Cannabis Regulation's pre-Metrc 'Retail Sales' column? Its label says retail sales and Rhode Island had only a medical market then, but over 35 months every value is an exact multiple of $25 - a greatest common divisor no sum of individual transactions produces - while the cultivator dollar column printed beside it in the same table has a greatest common divisor of $1, and the one row in the column sourced from Metrc is not a multiple of $25 at all. The retail column is restated in 1 month across the 11 editions, against 9 months for the cultivator dollar column printed beside it, and that single change is $0 for 2022-02 in the Feb22 edition against $9,619,450 from the Mar22 edition on. Closing it needs: Ask the Cannabis Control Commission what the Office of Cannabis Regulation's Retail Sales column measured and how it was collected, or locate the OCR methodology note that the sweep of every page and every edition footnote did not find. Until then the field is published under the Commission's own column name with measurement `unstated`, and its role is `none` so no cross-state metric can reach it.
- What does Rhode Island's Metrc category 'Bud/Flower' contain, and does it exclude pre-rolls, shake and trim the way the estate's whole-bud price standard requires? The extract lists it separately from Pre-Packaged Bud, Raw Pre-rolls, Infused Pre-Rolls and Shake/Trim, which is suggestive, but a category list is not a definition and the Commission publishes none. Blocks: price_per_gram. Closing it needs: Ask the Commission for the Metrc item-category definitions configured for Rhode Island, or find the regulation that enumerates them. A definition would move the basket from `unverified`; it would not on its own admit Rhode Island to the price chart, because DECISIONS Q7 excludes the state on the separate ground that the priced categories are a small minority of its bud dollars.
- Are the extract's DollarAmount figures gross or net of discounts, and do they include Rhode Island's sales tax and its cannabis excise? Closing it needs: Ask the Commission, or find a methodology note. A sweep of 16 artifacts on 2026-08-16 returned 0 hits for 'gross', 0 for 'discount' and 0 for 'excise'. Until it is answered both axes stay `unstated`, which is the same posture as the DC anchor and is not an inference from tax law.