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 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 Tuesday 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 Tuesday’s votes did not surprise him.
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