© Provided by Flint-Saginaw-Bay City WJRT Study: Michigan marijuana industry tops $3.2-billion
BANGOR TWP., Mich. (WJRT) (6/30/2021)–Michigan is seeing green!
A new study just out shows marijuana sales have already reached eye-watering heights in only a few years. But how much of that money is still under-the-table and evading state taxes? As it turns out, most of it.
“We were looking at, how is the community going to embrace this?”
Bangor Township got in on the ground floor when voters greenlighted legal weed. Two years later, Supervisor Glenn Rowley told ABC12 he couldn’t have imagined how fast that investment would grow.
“We were almost going on blind faith because we really did not know exactly how much we were going to be getting,” Rowley said.
It turned out to be a sure bet. The township has already collected some $280-thousand in initial revenue.
Growth backed-up by a brand new study, which revealed Michigan’s share of the burgeoning bud business had topped a whopping $3.2-billion.
“This is really the first study of its kind to ever look at the total size of the cannabis industry,” Brian Peterson related.
Peterson is a director at Anderson Economics Group, the Lansing-based research consulting firm that put the study together on behalf of the Michigan Cannabis Manufacturer’s Association.
“This is a market that has seen solid and quick growth,” he explained. “I think there are great opportunities in this market moving into the future.”
That’s on the books and off the books. The study showed consumers forked over approximately $1-billion dollars in over the counter, retail sales just last year. Another $1-billion came from medical caregivers. The balance was split, according to the study, into adult home-grow operations and illicit under-the-table deals, which not only dodge state tax rolls, but mandated safety tests. ABC12 called and emailed state regulators for a response, but hadn’t heard back at the time of publication.
“We can see in the visibility we have that there are an increasing amount of transactions that were previously happening in the illicit market that are now moving into these retails store settings,” Peterson said.
Rowley told ABC12 he believed illicit sales were on the decline as the industry there hit its stride. He said that was one of the reasons the township’s favorable pot policies were on the books in the first place.
“If somebody wanted to go and buy marijuana, they could,” he said of the industry prior to 2018, when Michigan voters approved recreational, adult-use marijuana. “We would much rather… a state licensed facility.”
The study also found one in five Michigan residents reported using cannabis in the last year, nearly double what it was a decade earlier. Revenue sharing agreements mean hubs like Bangor Township can take that all the way to the bank.
“We’re just going to have more and more of an economic benefit locally,” Rowley said. “So, hey, maybe we’re going to have a lot more paved roads. We don’t necessarily have to pave them in green so people know where the money came from, but we’re going to be able to do a lot more things than we normally could.”
Copyright 2021 WJRT. All rights reserved.
Recent Comments