MLive reporters sometimes go to extremes to find an interesting story. In the case of a package of stories on retail marijuana businesses in Michigan, that meant going to the very western edge of the Upper Peninsula.
Investigative reporters Gus Burns and Matthew Miller traveled to the Wisconsin border to research a story that blends a topic very much of our times – legalized marijuana – with the social, economic and law enforcement impacts of pot sales on communities all along the state divide.
Marijuana is legal for retail sale and personal use in Michigan. It is illegal in Wisconsin. And where there’s weed and a will to use it, there’s a way – roads leading to the 15 shops located in Michigan border towns.
For instance, one of the first businesses that drivers see when they cross the bridge from Marinette, Wisc., into Menominee, Mich., is a marijuana dispensary. That’s the case up and down the border, with the shops catering to buyers who come from as far away as Minnesota.
“In smaller cities we visited north of Menominee, residents seemed overwhelmingly happy with the addition of marijuana,” Burns said. “A Crystal Falls bartender told us the nearby shops brought in employees on their lunch hours and marijuana customers who stopped in for a bite or beer before making the drive back to Wisconsin or other states.”
Burns and Miller found that most people in Michigan say they benefit from the flood of business, helping provide decent paying jobs in areas that often struggle economically.
“The only naysayers we heard from were on the Wisconsin side, where there were some of the same concerns Michigan dealt with leading up to legalization – that marijuana will lead to increased crime or become accessible to kids,” Burns said.
The reporters also uncovered a boon in something on the Wisconsin side – tickets written by law enforcement when they stop cars coming back from Michigan and find illegal pot and paraphernalia. Fines start at $250 and escalate up to as much as $900.
This story developed in two dimensions – the efforts by Wisconsin law enforcement, which had the appearance of a targeted campaign, and a legal fight pitting marijuana shops against Menominee city government over the number of licenses being granted.
The first element developed anecdotally, when this spring two MLive environmental reporters working in the UP noticed the police stops along the border. They passed that tip along to Burns, who covers marijuana for MLive. Then in August, while going through federal court filings, Miller stumbled across the Menominee lawsuit.
“The lawsuit filed by marijuana license holders against the city jumped out,” Miller said. “I passed it along to Gus because marijuana is his beat. He wrote a great story and readers seemed keenly interested.”
Editors agreed, deciding we had the makings of a deeper and more interesting story, and sent Burns, Miller and photographer Joel Bissell up to the area in October for three days of reporting. They spent another month afterward collecting more interviews and researching records through the Freedom of Information act.
The result is a package of stories this week that are illuminating, and a bit nuanced. The lawsuit is an attempt by existing border pot shops to limit competition, but there’s not a ton of conflict over marijuana on either side of the border. And the more our reporters looked into the police angle, the more they learned that Wisconsin cops are mostly just doing their jobs, not running a sting operation.
“We had heard a lot of stories about Wisconsin police agencies targeting customers of Michigan marijuana shops,” Miller said. “The reporting didn't uncover anything that appeared to be systematic, though the number of citations are way up.”
One thing is for certain – in an area where jobs are hard to come by marijuana can be a potent economic force and a persistent presence in the daily life of a community. The biggest threat of all, Burns said, is if Wisconsin were to legalize the drug.
“The largest impact is undoubtedly going to be for the workers – these jobs pay well for the area that isn’t spilling over with great employment opportunities,” Burns said. “We spoke to former retail managers, a police dispatcher and nurses assistants who left pretty good jobs to work in the Michigan marijuana industry.
“If those stores and employers vanish, they’ll definitely be scrambling to find equivalent alternatives.”
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