Happy birthday, legal weed!

April 21 represents one year since the first recreational marijuana sales occurred in New Jersey, after nearly a decade of activism in the Garden State. Across New Jersey, customers flocked to 12 dispensaries and waited on line — sometimes for hours — to be among the first people to legally purchase cannabis for personal use.

“I’ve waited 50 f—ing years for this!,” one customer yelled before walking into a dispensary to make his first purchase last year.

Experts predict that the New Jersey cannabis industry might top $3 billion within a few years. It’s not a surprising estimation, with nearly $200 million sold in the second and third quarters last year — while the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory Commission has been issuing licenses.

In the second and third quarter of 2022, the state Treasury Department collected about $12.3 million in cannabis taxes, including $225,000 from the Social Equity Excise Fee, an extra tax levied on cannabis cultivators and wholesalers designed to reinvest in communities impacted by the War on Drugs.

The commission has yet to release sales or tax data for the fourth quarter of 2022 or first quarter of 2023.

But as the road to get to legal weed proved, nothing about cannabis is easy. Here what we’ve learned over the first 365 days of the Garden State’s foray into cannabis, and what stories we’ll be following into 2024.