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(music) Cannabis in Michigan.

It's hard to miss... the economic and visual landscapes of Michigan and the Great Lakes Bay Region, along with the smell, have dramatically changed.

We all see the billboards advertising various shops, some with quirky names touting legal cannabis products, primarily marijuana.

In some communities, it feels like these occupy every other street corner.

It is big business with a lot of high tech science behind it.

Some local governments have embraced it.

Others have said, “No ”, not in my backyard.

Recent studies show 20 to 25% of adults in Michigan have used cannabis.

That means almost three quarters of the population probably has never stepped foot into one of the hundreds of retail establishments in Michigan.

Today, roughly 80% of Michiganders live within a 20 minute drive of a cannabis retail store.

So with that said, let's take a look behind the scenes at this budding industry.

Let's start by visiting a cannabis grow operation and a retail shop.

Emerald Fire in Coleman.

Until recently, the only store in Midland County selling cannabis.

Now we're looking at the water room and our vertically integrated operation at Emerald Fire Farms.

Behind me is our reverse osmosis, combined with our ozone skid, which comes over, combines with our nutrients.

Everything is mixed up here based on the program we have for each individual room.

It's taken from here and it's shot out through these lines for the different feeding cycles that we have for all eight rooms for all our plants.

So this is where it all starts for us in the grow process.

This is our mother room.

This is where we source all our genetics from...

I mean by genetics, The different strains, the Indica, the Sativa... the Hybrids.

Everything that ends up in our grow rooms.

These are some of the older mother plants that we have here.

We've got plants in here that we've had genetics as old as six years.

From there we take cuttings off these mother plants, which are just a clone to cut, which end up over here.

And from there they're transplanted out into our grow rooms where they'll go into a vegetative state for another three weeks, which means it'll stay in a light cycle of 18 hours of sunlight and 6 hours of darkness.

Then from there, we'll transfer them in to our flower rows, which we change the flowering time from 12 hours of sunlight to 12 hours of darkness.

And what that does, that stimulates the plant to revert to a flower cycle, which will start to produce the buds on the plant, which is the actual cannabis that we resell them.

So this is one of our eight flower rooms.

These are all in the flowering stage here.

We grow obviously indoors here.

The reason why we grow indoors is just to cut down on all the different things that can screw up a crop.

Michigans climate is not really conducive to growing these types of plants.

You really need a tropical setting.

We grow under an LED lamp... You need to control the humidity.

You need to be able to dial the light up and down to mimic the curvature of the earth as the sun goes around it.

You really need to have that level of control to produce a plant like this.

Without those controls in place, you can just can't grow a quality plant in the Michigan environment.

We have a capacity license here from the state of Michigan, which allows us to grow, cultivate 2000 plants.

This room here has approximately 160 plants in it.

This is a hybrid plant, primarily an indica plant, about 70% with the other part of the plant being the genetics being a 30% mix.

We grow in a hydroponic grow medium.

This is actually recycled rockwool and this acts as a substrate which actually holds the nutrients that come out of here between four and five times a day that help bring the nutrients to the plant itself.

We want to make it the most optimal conditions for this plant to thrive.

And that's really what we've got here is a really healthy, thriving plant.

And this is about about four days from being fully harvested...from the complete grow cycle, from the day we take a cutting out of this, which is a clone of this plant.

It takes about 12 weeks.

We have about three weeks in the vegetative stage, and then we've got about another nine weeks in the flower stage.

(Fan noise) This is our dry room.

This is where it comes after our nine week growing process comes in here.

Cool, dry area for about a week and a half, two weeks to dry out slowly to preserve as much terpenes and THC as possible.

And then after here, it's off to our trim r oom.

This is our trim room.

This is our final step of our drying process.

After the dry room comes here, you can see that they are trimming up flower, getting off all the leaves, saving all the trichomes as much as possible, getting them ready for our lab testing, and then off to the shelves.

(cannabis flowers poured in bag) (Music) So when you first come into our dispensary anywhere in the state of Michigan, you have to get your scanned ID and that can come through anything when it come to passport, State ID, tribal to make sure that you're just over 21.

It's not actually tracked in the state anymore.

When it was medical used to have those kind of things, but now it's just an internal system and then we just track to make sure we don't oversell.

So a lot of people I have a lot of people that come in, especially more of the elderly.

Their biggest issue is my name kept in your system, you know, is my next door neighbor going to know I'm smoking?

It's all discreet.

So the system is just there to make sure that we're not legally overselling you.

They come through, wait in the reception here, and we take them on back with our bud tender.

(door opens) So our next step is going to be taking back by one of my budtenders through the sales floor door.

Come on and check it out.

And now we're on our sales floor.

This is where we keep a large variety of products.

We have flower, topicals, concentrates and edibles.

A lot of these are used by our customers for their appetites, anxiety, sleep and just overall daytime regulation.

Let me show you a few products.

So when we're talking cannabis sales... this is one of the biggest things...flower.

We can grind it up and we can also add it into a pre-roll.

This is going to be more of your marijuana cigarette... just more of your applicable I'm ready to go.

We can also break these products down into different edibles.

This is going to be more of your chocolate.

And when it comes into all of these edibles, you're going to have a compliance bar that's going to tell you your dosing, how much you're going to take, recommended amount and those kind of things.

We can also break these down into gummies.

Most of these gummies are also going to have quite a different assortment.

I've got different edibles that also break down into popcorn and so on.

We can also break those into a “non-psychoactive ”.

So we have different rubs and we have different tinctures for those who just can't consume the normal way.

And it's going to be just a dropper that you're going to drop right in your mouth.

There's actually a lot of people that use this for their pets as well... easiest thing to use.

So as you can see, we have a large variety of products that can be kind of overwhelming.

This is where my bartenders are going to give you that one on one experience when it comes to any of those questions, concerns or issues.

They're going to be the ones to explain it.

I was having a lot of issues with sleep.

I have some back issues with my spine.

I have fibromyalgia...

I was having So I went to the dispensary and I said, you probably don't hear this very often, but I said, I don't want to get high, but I need something to help me sleep, help me with the pain.

And so I they gave me some, started me with some gummies that had like THC and CBD, and now I just I, I smoke at bedtime.

My doctor wanted me to take.

I had like 30 milligrams of muscle relaxers to help me sleep.

Every time I go, he wants me to try another pill.

And I'm like, I don't.

I just, you know, I can smoke.

It's natural.

It's a plant.

I'm not putting a bunch of manmade chemical garbage in my body and it helps.

I don't have to take the pills.

My husband got off pain pills.

He was on for years and muscle relaxers and gabapentin and, you know, and I definitely think it's more looked at as health benefit-wise.

I broke my back about.

23 years ago.

And they had me on three different pain medications that I don't take anymore.

I got into it of a pain regiment regular medicine, I get sick to my stomach from like I guess the medicine itself and it makes me tired and I couldn't even go to work, you know...and now I Im fine with this.

I get out of work, I come home I'm just fine.

I instead of taking pills, I just smoke a little and I'm fine.

When I started.

It was 25 years or so ago.

And it was illegal.

You weren't supposed to have it.

You didn't want to get caught with it.

And now, you know, you can go to the store, you can legally learn about it, what it's for and how it's used.

And you couldn't find that back then when when I was using And it's an awesome way to manage a lot of things.

So how did we get heret?

First, in 2008, Michigan voters approved the legalization of medical marijuana statewide.

That's when we first started seeing marijuana stores... also called dispensaries pop up.

Only qualified patients had access.

Then in 2018, a ballot initiative to legalize recreational cannabis for persons ages 21 and older was passed by Michigan voters.

The first sales of “adult use ” marijuana began on December 1, 2019.

After that, recreational dispensaries began to open throughout Michigan, which is now one of 24 states to legalize it.

However, one thing to remember, federal law still prohibits marijuana.

Another thing to remember.

Cannabis is big business in Michigan.

(cash register dings loudly) The CannaTech expo, a major cannabis tradeshow, brings together thousands of industry professionals to network and share information on this expanding market.

V.O.

: Jen Wynn “We're here at the Soaring Eagle Casino for our fourth annual CannaTech Expo.

This is our third one at this location.

Today, we have people walking the floor, visiting with different exhibitors, displaying all different types of business for cannabis.

So it could be anywhere from companies that do packaging, labeling.

Extraction.

We have banking finance attorneys.

We have seminars going on all day long.

So it's really about he business of cannabis and meeting new people and talking about what's new in the business.

We're here at CannaTech showing everyone our automated bud sorting machine.

This machine sorts.

sizes from “shake ” to “A buds ” at about 30 pounds an hour.

It's very simple.

It's safe.

It uses a 150 watt motor and it's easy to clean.

You just pull it apart and wipe it down with alcohol.

Everything that touches the products is food grade, stainless steel.

So this is a solution that can knock days... man days, off of your harvest.

I'm here at the Industry Marketplace for Cannabis and we are a payment processor, and our job is to get rid of the cash problem associated with anyone in the cannabis space.

We have an electronic platform system that allows dispensaries or growers or manufacturers to sell cannabis and a debit or credit card fashion.

There are fees involved in each type of card.

So it's 2.89% that the dispensary gets charged for the transaction and the consumer will be charged $4 per transaction as a convenience fee to take whatever form of payment they're carrying into the dispensary.

You don't have to hit a money machine.

You don't have to download an app.

It's not crypto based, It is a payment form, the payment form that you're carrying is very convenient and easy to use and safe.

(convention background sound) So we are introducing the full spectrum LED grow light to replace the traditional high pressure sodium, which is simulating the sunlight so we can simulate the sun, sunrise and sunset, so which help the plants grow healthier and getting higher quality and higher quantities flowers.

We can also save energy compared to traditional high pressure sodium.

(convention background sound) Oversight of this industry and Michigan is the responsibility of the Cannabis Regulatory Agency led by Executive Director Brian Hanna.

He spoke at the CannaTech Expo and Conference in Mount In Mt.

Pleasant in May 2023.

You know, we are in year six of of this new industry, and we've had our first licenses issued five years ago.

We're learning along with everybody.

We are in charge of regulating four different acts...

The Michigan Medical Marijuana Act of 2008 that started the Patient and Caregiver program in the state of Michigan, of which we have right now, 155,000 registered patients and 15,000 registered caregivers.

We also regulate the the medical marijuana Facilities Licensing Act, and that created in 2016 the model for medical marijuana businesses in the state of Michigan.

And then we regulate also Michigan regulation and taxation of marijuana in the state of Michigan, which was enacted in 2018.

And so we regulate adult-use businesses in the state of Michigan.

And then we have portions of the Industrial Hemp Research Act, which is we licensed hemp processor handler licenses in the state of Michigan.

So we want to be national leaders in regulating cannabis in the state of Michigan, and that is by supporting businesses and supporting the consumers, make sure they're safe.

access to product.

We have, if you will, two main goals.

Goal one is listen to stakeholders... whats working, what's not.

And when I say stakeholders, as many people as possible licensees, patients, advocates, municipalities.

And our second goal, we're aware of illicit product being funneled into the regulated market.

And we've had some big wins lately of trying to find that, stopping that because we want to support those that are following the rules and we want to support those at the end state that are using the product.

We want safe access to safe product for the consumer.

So we want to stop that activity of those that are looking to cut corners, bring in cheaper materials that may or may not be tested.

And we're having great results with that.

And so by doing those two main goals, we're moving ahead and moving Michigan forward and trying to be the national leader in model for cannabis regulatory.

There is no Federal guidance.

You know, we're trying to do something that is still illegal at the Federal level.

And so by partnering with other states, we're learning best practices.

And you will see a patchwork of different state requirements when it comes to testing.

And we took purposely a stricter stance to protect the health of the consumer at the end of the day.

I mean, this is a very important industry.

This industry as of right now, the data that we currently have supports 30,000 jobs in the state of Michigan.

That's huge.

That's a 32% increase from this time last year.

There are 22,000 jobs in industry now.

There's almost 30,000 that's big that supports people in their families, their livelihoods, you know, opportunity.

Also, you know, we've had over $325 million worth in taxes collected from this industry, both the medical and adult use industries.

And so those moneys go back to the governments, go back to the people through programs.

And I think that those are important things to think about, you know, and those things, you know, help a citizens of Michigan and something that Michiganders should be proud.

The law in Michigan leaves it up to each municipality to decide whether to allow the manufacture and sale of cannabis in their community.

Those who do choose to participate get a share of the tax revenue collected from the sale of cannabis.

The state collects a 6% tax on medical marijuana.

A 16% tax on recreational.

The Michigan Department of Treasury reported in February 2024, that 198 cities, and townships and 71 counties would receive payments from taxes collected in 2023.

One of the first municipalities to say yes was Bangor Township, which borders Bay City.

You hear some of the people say, it's Bangor Township, its the “dope capital of Michigan ” or its “Marijuanaville ”.

We ended up being the second municipal building in the state of Michigan to approve medical use.

How we actually came to that, a lot of discussion because it was very controversial.

It's like, is this something that we even want to do?

So we started doing our research, challanged the board, talked to our residents.

Let's find out if this is a good fit for Bangor.

The extra revenue would be nice, although we didn't have a clue how much it would be, we know it'd be more than nothing and our financial position at the time was not a strong one.

So we kind of gave them a challenge.

This is it's our time to to do something or just get out of the way.

It's go talk to your people.

We need to move fast on this because all the other municipalities in the state of Michigan are having these conversations as well.

We had our first medicinal shop...dispensry provisioning center was the terminology used back then opened down on Wilder Road and they were the first one in Bay County.

And that was so popular that was something else.

We saw recreational voted in 2018.

What we did is we put a limit where we would say we would have X number of provisioning centers of retail establishments or dispensaries.

There'd be X number of growing facilities.

And with the growing facilities, there were three different sizes or categories that could be in there, a certain number for testing facilities, a certain number for transportation.

So we had to set limit at each of the categories.

Now, what we did know, because we were the very first ones to do it, how many of each should we have?

So we guessed and then we'd have to go back and we change things as necessary.

And once again, it's supply and demand.

It's no different than any other sort of retail business.

You have too many of them... you're not going to exist, you have too few.

You're going to have a higher dollar amount that you're going to ask.

It's supply and demand.

It's no different than the number of seven elevens we would need for Slurpees.

As far as the financial impact for Bangor Township for 2023, our share of the excise tax pie from the state of Michigan was $886,295.25 Our revenue from permits the $5,000 that we charge each organization was $200,000 for recreational operations and $115,000 for medical operations.

So that's a total of $1,201,295.25 This is really the equivalent of the township getting a second job in bringing some much needed revenue to be able to do some very important projects.

Now, what we use the money for...a few different things.

One, administratively, there's a lot of work that has to be done when when a new permit comes in.

We also have to pay for for policing of this.

We have to do inspections for these.

So there's a lot of different expenditures of money that goes out there.

The rest of it just goes into our general fund, where it's up for us to use whatever we would like it for.

So, we pave roads, we replace lead service lines, we put a new drinking water lines, take waterlines that instead of being four inches, are now with eight inches.

We buy new fighter trucks.

So this gave us the opportunity to do a lot of very good things that we wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

What this industry has done from an economic aspect is made it really hard for our fast food friends to be able to find employees.

The starting wage that a lot of these marijuana facilities are higher than what they would pay a line corporate someone to drop fries.

So they get a good starting wage and there's a lot of these shops, so there's plenty of job opportunities available for them.

Plus, we have some of our growing facilities.

You know, that tech requires a lot of people.

Agriculture's the number two industry in the state of Michigan.

Why should this product be any different?

A lot of people have moved from the service industry, like working at restaurants or working at gas stations.

You know, customer facing jobs to the cannabis industry.

And a large portion of that is because the customer base is usually a little bit easier to deal with.

It's a little bit slower paced, but also they're getting paid a better wage.

On top of getting tipped... unlike how they would at one of those type of jobs.

So it is a growing phenomenon that I've seen happen.

And honestly, a lot of cannabis business owners look to those people because they already have the forward facing, you know, customer facing type of experience.

They know how to work with people.

They know how to communicate properly.

And you can teach somebody about the cannabis side of it, but you can't really teach people how to be good at interacting with other people.

So that that's something that I've noticed that's happened pretty steadily since I started working in this industry.

I started out working in a grow and then moved to budtending and I really got a taste for working with people when I was budtending.

After budtending, I got an assistant manager position and then after that I found a managerial position and made it a point to make a career out of working with weed because I had a passion for it.

So I really enjoyed the opportunities that this industry has provided me and it provides a lot of jobs for a lot of good people.

So, I look back and we were in a position of, man...what do we do here?

We get a lead follower, just get out of the way.

And that was a tough decision.

All of the unknowns... seeing what I see now, this worked out well and I'm pleased with the decision that we made.

Pinconning Township in Northern Bay County is all in on cannabis too.

So Essence Provisioning Center is a small family-owned and operated retail store.

We started off in 2019 as a medical only cannabis sales facility and now we've grown into a both retail, medical and adult use sales facility.

My wife thinks I'm absolutely out of my mind, traveling almost 2 hours away from home to start up a business, quit my 23 year career at Chrysler and go to this tiny town of 3000 people-ish and start up shop.

Initially, I looked at the Tri-County area being Wayne, Oakland and McComb Counties and I couldn't find anything that was available.

And so I kept having to expand my circle of search for opportunities.

I got to Saginaw and Bay City.

Saginaw at the time wasn't on board.

Bay City was, but Bay City was already proving itself to be what I would consider a bloodbath of competition.

So I kept going north and I found Pinconning.

So I took a chance buying a property right on I-75.

Ideally, if everything works as planned, Essence will become a larger brand.

I am working on right now this grow operation, this grow operation, which is a 7500 square foot facility.

State of the art.

When all is said and done, this is a seven figure event and it will be capable of up to 6500 plants.

And I'm looking to vertically integrated so that I can supply myself and potentially others with cannabis related products.

So the climate has changed significantly since I first started.

Medical...let's just throw that off the table.

As far as I'm concerned, it's such a small percentage of sales, not only in my store but in most stores in the state.

Recreational is really the game changer.

And in the beginning with recreational cannabis, particularly the flower, you know, the marijuana plants, finding sourcing was extremely difficult.

It was so early on that I didn't need much.

It didn't need much at all.

I'm talking about a couple of pounds.

It really isn't a lot.

And I couldn't I couldn't get the sourcing for it.

It was very, very difficult because some of the players in the game who are more experienced were buying up entire crops.

They were going to growers that were licensed and saying, Hey, listen, whatever it is, I'll take it when it's done will strike the price right now and go.

The price started back at that time in the $4000 to $5000 a pound range and has subsequently dropped to probably average $1100 to $1200 a pound at current rate.

A breakdown of sales by product category would look something like this, probably 40% loose flower followed by edibles in it I'd say probably 20 to 25%... Pre-rolled, so loose flower rolled up into Pre-rolls is another 15% to 20% and the last category is really kind of concentrates.

If you are buying a pre-roll, loose flower, or edibles your concentrations of THC might be in the 25% on average.

When you get into concentrates, that particular product can contain 80% to 90% plus THC.

So it's so much more potent.

Probably 65% of my clientele are 50 and older.

It's odd, you'd think being a pot shop, right?

It's a bunch of young kids looking to get stoned.

It really isn't.

At least not here.

It's people looking to help themselves.

They don't want opioids.

They don't want the sleeping pills that their doctors and pharmacies are giving them.

They're looking for natural remedial activity for aches and pains, inflammations, things like that.

And the crazy thing about it is they're finding it.

So they are they are coming back and they're exploratory, where they're getting advice from our budtenders saying, hey, listen, based on what you're telling me, I think this would be a good fit and they're fine tuning it and they are return customers.

They are coming back and they are looking for help with legitimate health issues versus just going to get stoned at a party on a Friday night.

We are from Ohio and we are on our way to the UP.

The UP for a week or so of just to kind of chill out.

Relax and get away from everyone and our job.

So just enjoy each other.

So we thought we'd stop here on the way and get some cannabis and see how that works for us.

See if it kind of helps us to relax.

Okay, If you are up for it buy two.

Yeah.

yeah, yeah, that's fine.

(budtender): It seems that maybe you have to figure it out.

It was a decision made by the people.

They wanted it.

They voted for it for Pinconning Township.

It has been a positive effect on the township.

The future of being able to provide jobs in our area as the market stabilize, as it will be more longevity, I believe, and um stable employment.

They pay decently.... the jobs do.

Pinconning Township has issued 35 licenses through this last fiscal year.

Our very first year we listed 84 licenses.

So it has reduced and that is the market stabilizes.

A lot of the businesses that were created never really came into being.

They got a business license and they may have gotten approved and they had a location, but things never really took off.

The licenses... when we talked about licenses sometimes are dual license because we have a medical license that needs to coincide with the adult use license.

So if somebody holds a medical dispensary license, they also hold medical adult use retailer license.

So that person would have two licenses.

So when the numbers look like they are like , like Kurt would have two for that as well as the grow he's going to put in there.

So he will have four licenses because of a medical grow as well as an adult use grow.

So he'd be a four license facility so like Pincanna holds 17 licenses.

We have several growers Pincanna... Great Lakes Logistical Experts... Agritech are the big ones that are operating so far.

Pincanna... WOJO CO as well as Muha Meds are processing facilities.

Here at Muha Med's Pinconning we make several cannabis infused products ranging from our infused gummies here which have seven different flavors... We have our Muha vape cards, which come in a 510 formulation and a disposable formulation.

We also have and infused pre-roll and then we also make concentrates as well.

And those products are sold throughout the state, through the state licensed facilities, ranging anywhere from the Upper Peninsula all the way down to the lower end of Michigan.

So we span the entire state with all the products that we produce here.

This I'm holding my hand is THC distillate.

This is a main component of the majority of the products that we make here.

So this product here comes derived from plants and formed into the distillate through our extraction methods that we have here on site.

All of the products that we create here at Muha Med's Pinconning are tested by a state license facility.

They come in here, the grab the samples and everything is tested.

Once the testing is received back, that's when we're able to sell all these products.

So as employees are brought on board, they start out at $14 an hour.

After 30 days, they're bumped up $1.

As long as their attendance and performance is good, the $15 an hour from there, it's going to be all performance based.

So we can range anywhere from $17 to $20 an hour, depending on what position they find themselves in.

We have two processing licenses here, one for medical, one for adult use.

The adult use license is 30,000 per year and the medical license is 12,000 per year.

That allows us to sell to both medical and recreational dispensaries throughout the state.

The impact for us with the licensing, the money has to be used to administer the license... the $5,000 per license that we charge.

For us, not have police protection in our area other than our regular county patrol.

So we have invested all of that money into the road patrol options.

So we contracted with the sheriff's department, we purchased a K-9 unit, all their vehicles, all their equipment, as well as a search drone that is used for the entire county.

Us being able to provide police service to our entire community at not any additional charges to our our township residents is a bonus.

Housing shortage in the area was it was a big one in the beginning especially when everybody was coming from out of the area.

They were staying in the campground if they could or could they buying houses, but there isn't any houses.

We would have liked to see some apartments be constructed, but maybe in the future.

(Craig Barnt): Why are we having all these now jobs coming in but people don't live here?

It's because we need housing.

We need good middle class, affordable housing.

We need apartments for young couples who are working at places that we don't have.

It's revealed a lot to the community.

It's brought a lot of funding in to the township.

But it's changed things.

While it's legal for adults to possess marijuana in Michigan, over 1600 municipalities have not approved the manufacture or sale of cannabis, including the city of Midland.

Well, within the state of Michigan, there was a statewide vote on whether or not to legalize marijuana.

And it did pass in the state.

Within the city of Midland, when we looked at how voters voted and the voters did not vote in favor of legalizing marijuana.

So that certainly impacted the decision that we made to not move forward with that.

We're going to wait and see what happens as we look at the communities around us, what's going on in those communities.

And we'll we will take a look at this at a later date.

That was our decision to to this point in time, we have not had any major requests like for us to rethink that decision.

And I think that's because now, you know, people can easily access it.

We have surrounding communities that sell it... so it doesn't become something, a driving force for us to start selling marijuana here in Midland.

But I think the communities where they're growing marijuana, our communities that really had no other industries before and they didn't have a really strong tax base.

We do have a strong tax base here in Midland, and that's around chemical manufacturing and it's really important that, you know, we look at what what employees do there and how, you know, we support those businesses.

Our chemical companies take their jobs very seriously.

They have a lot of safety requirements.

And so I think it's by our saying, you know, we're not interested right now that we're supporting them in that work also.

And in conversations, you know, the biggest issue that I hear is that with marijuana is that you can be sitting on your porch and have a glass of wine and you are not impacting anybody walking on the sidewalk in front of your house.

If you're on your front porch porch smoking a joint, folks on the on the sidewalks can smell that.

You know, we've had big issues in the past about, you know, not allowing people to smoke in our parks.

Well, how do you how do you manage that?

I mean, so smoking marijuana in the parks that, you know, that can be even become a big issue for us?

And then how do you manage that?

So these are, I mean, subtle things that communities have to then spend time on, which are really not the most driving and important issues that communities have to face.

There's a lot bigger issues in this.

So why should we do it for and create more problems for a community when you know we're not having them now?

(V.O.)

The law enforcement community has its concerns about marijuana.

Our chief concern when someone's consuming marijuana or any cannabis product and they get behind the wheel, is that just like with alcohol that we're going to have an increased incidence of impaired driving that leads to serious injury or or fatal crashes?

Generally, when we're on patrol, we're looking for a lot of the same things that we're going to see with alcohol impaired drivers.

It could be any number of things in particular.

What we're seeing a lot of is speeding and not just someone going five over, but someone going significantly above the speed limit.

We stop them and we notice there are certain behavioral changes, just like with alcohol.

more relaxed inhibitions.

I kind of like in this to someone sitting back in the seat a little bit more, kind of with the “hey dude ” thing.

It's very stereotypical to a lesser degree, that's kind of what we're looking for.

But we're also seeing things with the body... bloodshot, watery eyes.

We're still seeing that just like with alcohol, we can see that with cannabis or THC influenced drivers.

And then we're also seeing altered time distance perception, which could lead to that speeding discrepancy that we end up seeing or judgment indicators that stop signs and stoplights where someone's going through a light or they're not stopping in time.

And generally too when we get them out and we do sobriety tests out on the side of the road, just like with alcohol, what we're end up seeing is impairment demonstrated in sobriety tests.

The odor of marijuana, whether burnt or fresh, because there is a difference between the odors, can certainly be an indicator of impairment.

We're not going to make an arrest decision solely based on you smelled like marijuana.

There are people who work around cannabis or there are people who use cannabis.

And just because that smell sits there or carries with you doesn't mean that you are impaired driving down the road.

So we have to distinguish between that.

Just like with alcohol impaired drivers, we're not making a black and white determination of you need to end up going to jail.

We're going to look at the totality of the circumstances.

How is the individual driving, and what was our personal contact when we're talking with them?

How is their behavior and then also their performance on field sobriety tests out on the scene.

From there, we're going to bring everything together.

And essentially, if there are a lot of indicators that all add up and say this person's not safe to drive, then we're going to make the determination, make an arrest.

Well draw blood over at the hospital and then or other designated facility and then eventually the person will go to jail for that night.

But the results are going to take a little bit longer to be analyzed by our lab, and then we'll get results later.

The tricky thing with that is when we when we do our blood testing, especially in the case of cannabis impaired driving, what we're finding is that we have to get blood drives a lot quicker because THC in particular leaves the blood very quickly, even more so than what we think of with alcohol.

However, that doesn't mean that the impairment isn't there.

What THC ends up doing is it leaves the blood and then it enters the fatty tissues of the body where it's then released into those cannabinoid receptors into the body and then creates the impairing effect on the body.

But unfortunately, we don't really have a way of testing THC contained in fat of the body.

So the best way that we really have is is blood test.

Since legalization, we are seeing an increased issue and I think that's just natural.

That comes with more relaxed way of looking at cannabis that there's less of a stigma.

And so now it's it's more okay.

But so we really got to keep up on our enforcement efforts, but also our education efforts of you can use this if that if that's your personal choice.

But we still have to be careful about the impairing effects and getting down the road and driving cars because we've got a 2,000 pound bullet going down the road that can end up killing somebody.

And we don't always think about that, you know, especially in the case of legalization.

We don't want to think about cannabis as bad anymore.

We want to think about it's got all these great benefits.

A lot of those great benefits that people point to when they consume a cannabis product, though, is unfortunately also what leads to potential deadly circumstances while driving down the roads.

Go ahead 51... Gratiot and St. Andrews... white Malibu...

(V.O.

): The medical community also has its concerns about cannabis.

My concerns about people that now say, Hey, cannabis is legal, I can use it should be broken down by age groups and chronic disease.

So is there a place for cannabis?

Yes.

And is there a risk for cannabis?

Yes.

So the correct evaluation always has to come with a list of questions.

What's your cardiovascular health?

What's your pulmonary health?

Are you a minor?

And then finally, do you have an addictive personality?

And are you continually involved in a criminal justice system because of substance use disorder and other problems?

where cannabis is really not a good idea?

So if somebody was going to say to me, I can't sleep and I just smoke cannabis and go to bed, I have to respect that.

But we want to make sure you don't have so much cannabis in you that you can't function to drive a car or work heavy equipment or machinery the next day.

That's your employer's responsibility.

That is not a civil liberty that I'm going to blunt.

Secondarily, if I have a veteran who says I have flashbacks and I don't like my flashbacks, they ruin my life.

I can't be with my children or my wife or I can't be employed.

Cannabis is an acceptable treatment because we don't have modern medicines to help PTSD from veterans.

But I would say to a veteran, I will support your access to cannabis, but give up your driver's license because you're going to be smoking cannabis all day.

And clearly we would find a point where you were impaired and your risky and then there has to be and this is one of my pet peeves.

There has to be some common sense.

We should not allow cannabis in peanut brittle brownies and gummies to be sold in public unless it's in a child proof container.

I've never heard anybody say that, but it makes so much sense that if you're going to allow adults access, don't make it look like something kids are going to go after and that there's one group that cannabis should really not be involved in active use teenagers, adolescents and children.

So when it comes to development of the brain, science has shown that a child's brain starts from early childhood up to around the time the child is around 25, because the process of myelination, which is one of the key aspects of development of the brain, continues until you're at roughly around 25 years of age.

Using cannabis on a developing brain is not a good idea.

The incidence of children not reaching their maximum potential if they start smoking cannabis or become exposed to is much higher.

It's much higher compared to their peers who do not.

And then we also see from the data that sometimes use of cannabis can be a gateway drug to having children experimenting with or the much more lethal substance of abuse like cocaine, heroin and things like that.

When it comes to cannabis use, there is a lot of push from the politicians and also from the media suggesting that it is safe.

For anybody who has a brain is still developing...

I would say it's better to stay away from cannabis.

For the safety of cannabis users, the state of Michigan put in place stringent testing measures for all cannabis products sold in retail stores.

Viridis is a licensed safety compliance facility.

We have two laboratories, one in Lansing and one in Bay City.

We currently test for approximately 40% to 50% of the testing market.

You know, we work hard to continue to drive and pursue science at the highest level when testing cannabis products.

Our primary mission essentially is to make certain that cannabis product going to the consumer or to patients is a safe, healthy product to consume, ingest or smoke.

In 2017, the MRA, the Marijuana Regulatory Agency, which has now been renamed to the Cannabis Regulatory Agency, was given the role and responsibility of developing rules and different thresholds for all aspects of the cannabis market for growers, processors, transporters, retail operaters and safety compliance facilities.

There is quite a bit of stringent testing that is required.

Our field technicians go to the customers and they collect the samples that are going to be tested as per the state regulations.

Brandon, one of our field techs has just come back from the customer.

He's got a sample or multiple samples in the bag that is sealed and is locked and tagged with the number that has been assigned to them by the Cannabis Regulatory agency.

So he has in the field documented that he's got them all that that's in the database.

He's brought them back here... he's signed them in and they are going to be in secured storage until the next step, which is when an accessioning technician takes them out of storage, accepts them in the database into the system.

They're assigned a laboratory number and then they will go off to be tested for whatever they require.

The next step in the process is when the sample has come into the laboratory and it's been signed in.

It goes into our cold storage where it waits until accession.

So inside this walk in refrigerator, the climate is controlled, the humidity is controlled, and it's locked so that only people with authorized access can get into the into the fridge.

The next step in the process is foreign matter observation.

We look at the samples under the microscope, as Lauren is doing now, for the presence of things like bugs or gnats or inorganic matter like trellis netting.

And then if any of the samples fail, she would take a photo of that and then the customer would be notified that their sample has failed for foreign matter.

When the samples are received from the customer, they're whole, like this.

Like what you see here, whole buds.

Some of this sample will be set aside for microbial analysis, but the rest of it will be ground up or homogenized in these devices here, which is a grinding mill.

They'll put some small ceramic beads in there and shake it up and down and grind them up into powder.

And then when they're ground up into powder, they look like this.

Once the samples are ground up like that, portions of that ground sample will be set aside for each of the different analyzes In the laboratory workspace, we have different areas where we test for different things.

We test for water activity and moisture content of the cannabis flower, which the state requires us to do, tells us how wet the flower is.

We have another area where we test for cannabinoid content or potency.

We have another area where we test for pesticides, one where we test for metals, one where we test for microbial content, and another where we test for solvents and terpenes.

We are doing high level and high quality scientific testing of cannabis products for the health and safety of the consumers.

It's a very big responsibility.

The public depends upon safety compliance facilities to help provide them with products that are free from contaminants and are safe to use.

And you know, if you're a consumer, you don't want to be consuming something that has a lot of heavy metals.

If you have a respiratory issue, you don't want to be inhaling a product that's may have Aspergillus spores.

So, I think the state of Michigan, in that regard has done a good job in making sure that the general public gets good, safe, healthy product.

(customer): Take care have a good one.

So what does the future hold for cannabis in Michigan?

and the nation?

Michigan's legalization is a little over five years old.

It's the second largest cannabis economy in the nation.

In 2023, more than $3 billion of cannabis were sold to adult use consumers, bringing in almost half a billion in income taxes for the state.

There's been a huge shift in popular support for legalizing marijuana.

About 20 years ago, there was 30 to 35% popular support for legalization, so now it's at 70%, according to Gallup.

The reason for this dramatic change is largely, I think, because people have a better understanding about cannabis.

We had a very rapid understanding as states passed medical cannabis that cannabis is safer than a lot of legal medications, including opioids.

So people are just increasingly having a more honest understanding that this is something that can be helpful and that is far less harmful than things that are legal for adults.

So there's some confusion among some people thinking that once you change federal law, it's going to automatically be legal in all 50 states.

That is not true.

Each state that still prohibits cannabis and even those with legalization have some activities that remain illegal, like people under 21 using selling outside of the legal system.

So in addition to federal legalization, you need each individual state to legalize cannabis.

If you think of people when they're getting arrested for cannabis, usually it's not the DEA they're encountering.

If it's just personal possession, it's local law enforcement.

99% of all arrests are at the state and local level, not the federal level.

So for individual consumers, it actually has way more of an impact if the state they're in legalizes than federally.

Now, the federal law is also quite important.

While the federal government since around 2013, hasn't actually been prosecuting people just for using cannabis or selling cannabis within the context of a state law, there are still a ton of impacts that happen and there's this kind of cloud of illegality that hangs over this entire legal system.

I expect in time cannabis will be legal federally and eventually in every state.

How quickly that moves is a very much open question.

There are a lot of supporters of cannabis legalization that have moved on to other issues in the states where they have a ballot initiative process by and large have already legalized cannabis, and it takes usually years and years of advocacy to get through state legislatures.

So it could be quite a while before every state in the country legalizes.

So it's really important that people care about this issue, get involved, get engaged, support the movement.

There are still more than 200,000 Americans being arrested every single year for cannabis and probably around 40,000 in jail at any given point of time.

There are people that are losing their housing, their jobs.

Their whole lives are derailed by the stigma of this criminal conviction that they are still getting in dozens of states, despite the fact that more than 70% of Americans think cannabis should be legal.

Michigan can be a leader in the cannabis industry for sure.

In five years, I've seen a lot of growth occur in this industry, and when you see an industry that pops up essentially overnight or an industry that has transitioned from being an illegal industry to a legal industry, there's so much growth that happens.

And that's just really fascinating to an economist or someone who studies markets.

So the cannabis industry in Michigan, there is a lot of profit to be had.

So we saw a lot of entry initially because there was just so much profit opportunities.

There is a lot of opportunities all over the state to start selling a relatively high demand product that there was not a lot of competition at the time for.

So businesses swarmed into the industry and then you get to many businesses.

Not only that, we have gotten a lot better at growing the crop as well.

So suddenly the prices start coming down and a lot of those businesses, they just can't sustain.

And we find this nice new equilbrium where we don't have as many of the businesses that we've seen, but we now have businesses that are relatively stable and existing in the marketplace and thriving.

So we've seen innovation happen.

Michigan already has a jump on a lot of the bigger brands that would come out if this was say, federally legalized, or if we could even start trading internationally as well.

The advantage that Michigan has, we have unbelievably capable workers.

We have manufacturing workers who are looking for jobs at the moment.

So we have a workforce that can do it.

We have innovators.

We have people who, for the last five years have been thinking of how do I get even a better product in a marketplace that is overcrowded.

So when this becomes a larger market, we already have the best of the best here.

The future is a little hard to determine because we don't know what's going to happen with laws that are changing.

There's a lot of other unknowns as well.

So cannabis can be used for health reasons, but we don't really have a lot of studies to tell what are the health benefits and any health concerns that are going to happen.

So a lot of this is up in the air.

People might be drawn to cannabis if research comes out that says it's healthy and it's great for you... Or, it can go the other way...

It depends on the research coming out and then it depends on how the federal government is going to tap into this mindset.

I will say marijuana legalization is popular and growing in popularity to the point that it seems like a bad bet to say that in the next 5 to 10 years we would not have a federally legal cannabis industry that it does seem like this is going to happen.

So we should look for some transformations happening in the next decade, especially if we see more legalization happening at the federal level, then Michigan could be a central player in the cannabis industry in the same way that we are a central player in the auto-making industry.

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