A year after marijuana became legal, Michigan still months away from retail sales

Retail sales of recreational marijuana may still be months away and confined to select communities, even though Michigan began taking applications for businesses on Friday.

The Marijuana Regulatory Agency last week began accepting applications for what is expected to be a lucrative new industry. That’s more than a month ahead of a deadline established in the adult-use marijuana law approved by voters in 2018.

Exclusive Brands of Ann Arbor applied online at 12:17 a.m. Friday and got a pre-qualification notice 43 minutes later. The process takes little time for companies like Exclusive that already have been vetted to work in the state’s medical marijuana industry. 

“There’s still a lot of question marks” about recreational marijuana rules, “but I’m excited to learn all the answers and be part of the movement,” owner Omar Hishmeh told Bridge Magazine.

Exclusive operates as a “vertically integrated” medical marijuana business in Ann Arbor, where it is licensed to grow up to 500 plants and operate a retail dispensary and a processing facility that supplies products to other medical shops around the state. Medical marijuana has been legal in Michigan since a 2008 ballot measure. [Read more at Bridge]