Even though the Michigan Medical Marijuana Licensing Board approved licenses for 14 more cannabis businesses on Monday, another 215 are facing closure as a Wednesday deadline looms.
The 215 marijuana businesses have been operating under temporary emergency rules that expire on Halloween. Those businesses, mostly dispensaries and many in Detroit, will receive cease and desist letters on Thursday and must close if they want to have any chance of getting a license in the future. The state isn’t sure whether all of the 215 businesses are actually still operating and should have a list of the businesses that will have to shut down next week.
The state set the deadline as a means to get the medical marijuana market fully functioning and force those businesses that have submitted incomplete applications to either get in the rest of their documentation and join the fully regulated and taxed market for legal medical weed or shut down.
“We’ve been diligently working through this backlog from the very beginning,” said Andrew Brisbo, director of the state’s Bureau of Medical Marijuana Regulation. [Read more at Detroit Free Press]
