ANN ARBOR – Michigan’s nearly $3.2 billion recreational marijuana market is bolstered by the tens of thousands of customers from Ohio who can get to Monroe Township’s so-called “green mile” off I-75, just 11 miles north of the border. But some of those sales could return to Ohio in the next couple of years as its own recreational market, opening this year, grows.

Michigan’s status as the Midwest’s top weed-selling state — its $3.2 billion in annual sales bolstered by residents from neighboring states — faces a new challenge: Ohio will soon have its own burgeoning recreational cannabis market.

That change, starting as early as this month, is expected to take a bite out of Michigan’s cannabis sales, which at times have even surpassed sales in California, a state with four times the population and a long history of legal marijuana use.

But it could take years before Ohio’s market matures enough, experts say,  to stop the thousands of Ohioans from crossing the border for their weed needs.

“Usually it takes 18 to 24 months just to start off a program … and get something up and running,” said Beau Whitney, chief economist for the National Industrial Hemp Council of America.

That gives Michigan’s retailers — and the municipalities getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in marijuana tax money — some time before they face substantial competition.

As of now, there’s not much competition, said Andrew Narvaez, a Toledo resident who talked with Bridge Michigan as he visited King Budz, a marijuana retailer just 12 miles north of the Ohio border.

He said the cost for medicinal marijuana in Ohio is four times higher than recreational marijuana in Michigan. So, for now he said, it’s just a better deal to head north to Monroe Township, where seven stores form a “green mile” of marijuana businesses on LaPlaisance Road that begins at I-75.

“It needs to be as cheap if not cheaper,” said Narvaez, 32, for him to buy marijuana in Ohio.

But experts say as Ohio market expands, it will eventually have a negative impact on Michigan sales. When is the only question.

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