DEA promotes ad warning of cannabis laced with fentanyl (Newsletter: October 31, 2025)

Michigan marijuana tax increase: a 24% levy on the menu—and the bill might get sent back to the kitchen

The talk this week isn’t polite dinner conversation. It’s the kind of barstool argument that turns into policy: a Michigan marijuana tax increase, clocking in at 24 percent, now hanging by a thread while a court weighs a preliminary injunction. In a state where the Michigan cannabis market has become a cash register that never sleeps, the prospect of new cannabis taxation lands like a brick in a backpack. Consumers will feel it first—fewer impulse eighths, more bargain hunting, whispered detours back to the gray market. Operators, already juggling compliance and razor-thin margins, see a line item that could erase their year. And local governments counting on legal cannabis revenue for potholes and after-school programs might learn the hard way what happens when you squeeze a booming industry a little too hard. The lawyers are circling. The spreadsheets don’t lie. And the judge’s calendar—well, that’s the most valuable commodity of all. For a snapshot of what’s on the docket, the latest coverage out of Michigan has the bones of the fight laid bare in sober detail: a court is considering an injunction on the tax hike.

Here’s the rub: taxes make headlines, but they’re really about behavior. Raise the price, and the shopper who’s been staying loyal to licensed shelves starts running the calculus. Maybe they stretch a week longer between visits. Maybe they drift toward intoxicating hemp—those delta-this-and-that gummies in gas stations that claim to comply with the Farm Bill while promising a wink and a nudge. Cities are racing to catch up; Chicago just floated a plan to tax and regulate that hemp wave before it swallows the shoreline. Meanwhile in D.C., even the act of keeping the lights on in the federal government snarls around plant politics. If you want a case study in how a few words about “hemp” can jam a thousand pages of appropriations, take a stroll through this: Hemp dispute threatens bill to end federal shutdown (Newsletter: October 30, 2025). It’s a reminder that cannabis policy isn’t a clean kitchen—it’s a Friday night service with the fryer overflowing and the ticket printer spitting fire. Michigan’s proposed levy doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it sits inside a national food chain where every jurisdiction tastes the stew and throws in its own spice.

Cross the border to Ohio and you hit another kind of heat: legislators squabbling over how to rewrite a voter-approved marijuana law while tightening the screws on hemp products. The Senate swatted away House changes, shoving the whole contraption into a conference committee where lobbyists hover like hawks and entrepreneurs watch their business plans melt in real time. The message to operators is brutally simple—your rules aren’t settled until they’re settled, and even then, don’t exhale. Drive northeast to Maine, and the plot twists darker: a ballot push to recriminalize sales and home cultivation while leaving personal possession and medical intact. It’s a sleight-of-hand move dressed up as “balance,” and the kind of thing that sends a chill through every legal storefront from Kittery to Caribou. Against that backdrop, the national tension over hemp becomes more than a side dish—it’s the protein. For a window into how those hemp battles are reshaping the broader cannabis plate, see: Hemp dispute threatens bill to end federal shutdown (Newsletter: October 30, 2025) and its companion dispatch Hemp dispute threatens bill to end federal shutdown (Newsletter: October 30, 2025). Different angles, same takeaway: policymakers keep reaching for hemp’s steering wheel to drive the whole cannabis car.

Then there’s the spectacle—part politics, part celebrity cameo, part late-night TV. Pennsylvania’s governor and legislative brass sat down with Mike Tyson to talk marijuana as the legalization push heats up. It’s easy to roll your eyes, but the meeting says plenty about where we are. Cannabis has moved out of the alley and into the rotunda; the debate is less “if” than “how,” and that’s where markets live or die. While some regulators focus on product safety—Arizona’s aspergillus recalls are a sobering reminder—others hurl headlines about fentanyl-laced weed like Molotovs, a panic that plays well on cable but smears mud on every honest grower and lab tech punching the clock. Meanwhile, the most immediate disruption isn’t the boogeyman in a baggie; it’s the rule you can read, the tax you can calculate, the license you can win or lose. And hovering over it all is the federal machinery—the budget fights, the enforcement posture, the quiet memos that tell states what tolerance looks like on any given Tuesday. That’s why the hemp-versus-marijuana trench line matters so much to the dollars and cents on Main Street; if you need one more reminder that the fights in Washington can yank the handbrake on real businesses, pay attention here: Hemp dispute threatens bill to end federal shutdown (Newsletter: October 30, 2025).

What happens next? In Michigan, the court’s decision on that 24 percent cannabis tax could set the tone for 2026: hold the line and let the legal market breathe, or ratchet up the price and dare consumers to stay loyal. In Ohio, watch the conference room doors; compromise there will ripple through supply chains and balance sheets. Maine’s signature gathering will tell us if recriminalization has legs or was just a press release with delusions of grandeur. And in Pennsylvania, the policy grown-ups will have to translate star power into statutory text that makes dispensary counters and patient lives cleaner, safer, and saner. Through it all, the clearest signal is the simplest: stable, rational cannabis taxation builds durable legal cannabis revenue; chaos does the opposite. If you’re reading this on your phone between errands, here’s the takeaway—vote with your feet, your receipts, and your phone calls to the people who write the rules. And when you’re ready to explore lab-tested, high-quality options without the drama, slip into our shop and keep your journey grounded.