Minnesota Tribe Opens State’s First Recreational Marijuana Store Off Reservation Lands, As Cities Plan Government-Run Dispensaries

A Native American tribe over the weekend opened Minnesota’s first-ever legal recreational marijuana store outside of a reservation. The new shop, in Moorhead, will be followed next month by another location in St. Cloud that will also be operated by the White Earth Nation.

Meanwhile, as Minnesota’s adult-use cannabis market gets up and running, more than a dozen cities and counties are seeking to open their own, government-run stores.

“This has never been done before, being the first to be able to open an off-reservation dispensary, let alone just the first dispensary in the state,” Zach Wilson, CEO of White Earth Nation’s cannabis business, Waabigwan Mashkiki, told Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) about the Moorhead store.

The launch of the new shop comes after Gov. Tim Walz (DFL) signed of a landmark agreement earlier this month to allow the tribe to operate up to eight retail marijuana stores across the state.

Everything the store sells “is all completely vertical, seed to sale,” with products grown, processed and packaged by Waabigwan Mashkiki—which means flower medicine in Ojibway—Wilson said. “The only thing we don’t manufacture is our beverages, but everything else absolutely, completely in house.”

Available products on opening weekend reportedly included only smokeable flower and beverages, with gummies, concentrates and vape cartridges expected to be in stock soon. Lab-testing information on the products is available through affixed QR codes.

Adara Rutherford, who works in the tribe’s production facility, told MPR that the business is “one of the only few big companies in the state right now that is doing third-party testing.”

A visitor to the shop from Fargo, North Dakota, called the opening “a wonderful thing for Minnesota.”

“The stigmas of the harms of cannabis, I think they’re starting to understand that it’s not as harmful as they once thought, compared to everything else that’s out there,” said Damion Knudsen. “It’s the lesser of all the evils.”

Notably, Minnesota’s 2023 cannabis legalization law allows tribes within the state to open marijuana businesses before state licensing of businesses begins. Following the law’s enactment, a number of tribal governments, including White Earth Nation, the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, made early moves to enter the market.

Minnesota officials have said a compact with another tribe could be signed in the coming few weeks.

Nationwide, more than a quarter (26 percent) of the 358 federally recognized Indigenous communities in the continental U.S. are involved in some sort of cannabis program, according to a recently published infographic from the Indigenous Cannabis Industry Association (ICIA) and the law firm Vicente.

As for forthcoming government-run stores, MPR reports that 13 cities and counties in the state have applied for licenses to operate their own marijuana stores. The city of Anoka, for one, broke ground last week on a new $2.7 million facility, though the city’s liquor and cannabis operations manager says they’re still waiting on final approval from the state Office of Cannabis Management (OCM).

“We might be waiting around for it, but at least we’ll be ready to go, and we’ll have that in hand, and we can hit the ground running,” Kevin Morelli told MPR.

Other municipalities seeking licenses to run their own dispensaries include St. Joseph and Osseo, which are reportedly waiting to secure licenses before breaking ground on the facilities.

Minnesota’s deadline to apply for local government cannabis licenses was March 16, beginning a 90-day approval window. An OCM representative said the agency expects municipal stores to begin opening this summer.

By law, Minnesota allows local governments to limit the number of retailers in their jurisdictions, though it requires leaders to allow at least one marijuana store for every 12,500 residents.

Anoka Mayor Erik Skogquist told MPR that the city’s interest in cannabis is similar to its stance on alcohol. The city’s reportedly been in the liquor industry since 1937.

“I think the logic is very similar, where the city is the one in control, making sure that we are operating, operating well, operating responsibly, setting a good example. And then the secondary portion of it is also the financial side of it,” said Anoka Mayor Erik Skogquist.

The Anoka dispensary reportedly isn’t expected to be profitable until its third year of operation.

Skogquist described the store as “an opportunity for the city to basically expand our current enterprise, to be able to have this as well and potentially raise millions of revenue that we can use to cover things like parks or some policing or other things that won’t have to come off of the backs of the property-tax-paying public.”

Separately in Minnesota, a state appeals court is set to decide whether state officials have the authority to prosecute tribal members for cannabis crimes committed on tribal land. The case centers on a White Earth citizen who allegedly sold cannabis from his tobacco store on reservation land in Mahnomen.

Last month, meanwhile, state officials moved to delay a separate drug reform—the opening of safe drug consumption sites, meant to allow people to use drugs in a safer, supervised setting.

“More work needs to be done on a state and federal level before these services can be implemented in a way that is safe for participants and Harm Reduction programs,” a representative for the Department of Human Services (DHS) Behavioral Health Administration said at the time.

In March, lawmakers also filed legislation that would create a system to allow legal access to psilocybin for medical purposes. That came just days after the introduction of a separate bill that would legalize personal psilocybin use and possession among adults.

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