Residents of Michigan towns bordering Indiana and Wisconsin voted to ban or limit marijuana shops

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In the summer, the board in mostly rural Niles Township gave a preliminary OK to 21 cannabis stores along one road currently dotted with businesses and surrounded by farmland.

On Tuesday, Nov. 4, voters rejected them all.

Nearly 6 in 10 voters in the township along Michigan’s border with Indiana approved a ballot measure prohibiting any cannabis stores from opening there. Many residents said they didn’t want to see their township look like the rest of Berrien County, where 27 pot shops operate, including seven in the neighboring city of Niles.

That vote — and another on Nov. 4 limiting marijuana stores in the Upper Peninsula city of Menominee, along the Wisconsin border — come at a time of uncertainty for Michigan’s cannabis industry.

Pot has proliferated across Michigan — there are now more than 850 stores across 75 of Michigan’s 83 counties — and that has driven down prices, prompting one of the biggest cannabis retailers to exit the state this year. State lawmakers have imposed a new 24% wholesale tax passed as part of a road-funding deal and some lawmakers want to limit the number of marijuana businesses statewide.

Recreational retailers sold about $251 million in product in September, according to the latest state figures, down from a peak of $294 million in August 2024, even as the state issued dozens of additional retail licenses since then.

The exploding number of cannabis retailers has been especially concentrated in the mostly small, rural border towns where the stores draw sometimes hundreds of customers a day from states where the drug remains illegal. On a per-capita basis, Michigan’s border counties have two or three times the number of dispensaries as interior counties.

Nathan Joyal, who opened the Upper Peninsula’s first marijuana storefront and now works as an assistant professor teaching about cannabis at Northern Michigan University, said last Tuesday’s votes did not surprise him.

“I don’t know that ‘pushing back,’ per se, is how I would phrase it,” Joyal said. “I think it’s about establishing limits.”

Brian Long told Bridge Michigan on Friday that he moved out of the city of Niles to neighboring Niles Township last summer because he lived next to a marijuana grow facility in the city and the stench was so bad his food used to taste like it.

He said dispensaries are owned by out-of-towners and cater to out-of-staters.

“People are wanting this for the tax money and the small couple of jobs that it provides, but the money going to the corporations, they don’t care about the locals,” Long said. “People aren’t adding that into the equation, that this is like a wolf feeding on the locals and it’s just not a good direction to allow that into the communities.”

Dispensary owners say they work hard to be good partners with their communities, employing local people and donating to local causes, in addition to the tax revenue they provide.

But some residents say there are just too many cannabis stores.

“If you’re not a proponent of marijuana — or even if you do use marijuana — at some point, you say, ‘Enough is enough. We don’t need any more pot shops,’” said lifelong Menominee resident Fred Hofer Jr.

However, communities’ attempts to establish such limits have been fraught.

In Menominee, population roughly 8,400, the City Council initially limited the number of licenses to two. When the city later tried to open up to more licenses, the two existing dispensaries sued to stop the expansion, but they lost last fall.

Six more dispensaries opened, bringing the total in the city to eight, and at least four others sought licenses before residents voted in the summer to cap the number of licenses at nine.

But a city council member sued, saying the referendum should’ve been on the November ballot, not August, and a judge quickly overturned the August election results, pushing the vote to the fall.

On Nov. 4, nearly 8 in 10 voters OK’d the nine-dispensary cap.

However, two dispensaries — Puff Cannabis and Highwire Farms — each say they have city approval to open as the ninth allowable storefront. Puff has sued.

“Our business is on the line here,” said Nick Hannawa, Puff’s vice president and chief legal counsel. “We’ve invested millions.”

Highwire officials could not be reached for comment.

Asked why he wants to open in a place where residents have repeatedly pushed back against the expansion of marijuana businesses, Hannawa said part of the reason is because Menominee is a border community, which is good for business.

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This story was originally published by Bridge Michigan and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.