Thanks to the Detroit Free Press for this:
Recreational marijuana officially went on sale in Detroit on Wednesday when the medical dispensary House of Dank on Fort Street, near the border of Lincoln Park, opened its doors to recreational buyers.
A few hours later on the opposite side of the city, DaCut, a medical marijuana dispensary on Gratiot Avenue in Detroit’s Eden Gardens neighborhood, started offering recreational marijuana.
“Going recreational in Detroit is a huge milestone for us,” Crystal Jamo, general manager of House of Dank, said. “Just because we’ve been waiting for it for so long that, like, ‘Pinch me, is it real?’ “
After the dispensary received from the state of Michigan the final approval needed to begin selling recreational marijuana late Tuesday afternoon, the company started transporting recreational marijuana products from its distribution center and moved products from the vaults of other House of Dank stores to the Fort Street dispensary, Mike DiLaura, House of Dank’s general counsel, said.
“Today and all weekend long, you’re going to see a real explosion of products,” he said. “That’s what’s really in store for Detroit. There’s so much more variety of products on the recreational side now in Michigan than on the medical side.”
On Wednesday morning, signs advertising that it sold recreational marijuana were being hung up on the exterior of the dispensary. Over at DaCut, General Manager Brenda Essmyer started getting recreational products into the system early Wednesday afternoon and said she expected the first recreational sale to happen within a few hours.
The start of recreational cannabis sales marks a long-awaited moment for cannabis businesses and marijuana consumers who have waited for Michigan’s largest city to allow recreational marijuana sales since it was legalized in the state in 2018.
Detroit took several months to craft an ordinance to allow these businesses in the community, an ordinance that a federal judge called “likely unconstitutional,” forcing the city to write a new ordinance that also faced multiple legal challenges.
After clearing a significant legal hurdle late last month, Detroit announced which applicants were to receive a recreational marijuana license from the city in December. House of Dank and DaCut were among the 33 applicants who met the qualifications for a recreational dispensary and received a license in the first round.
Detroit received 90 applications for the 60 limited recreational marijuana licenses available in the first round. The second application round could open as soon as the end of January, pending City Council approval. In the second round, the city will award up to 30 retail licenses, 20 microbusiness licenses and 20 consumption lounge licenses.
