New Buffalo’s $1.4 Million Cannabis Windfall Meets a Fight Over One Store

In the fall of 2025, the phone at the Berrien County Sheriff's Southcounty Patrol started ringing, and it was never local. Police in Indiana and beyond kept stopping cars heavy with Michigan cannabis, and the drivers kept naming the same store. "[I] began to field phone calls from out-of-state police agencies that were stopping people with large amounts of marijuana traveling back to their home state, admitting to law enforcement that they were coming from Trap Stars," Lieutenant Thad Chartrand later testified, one driver carrying 85 separate receipts, each for exactly 2.5 ounces, Michigan's per-sale legal maximum. Chartrand eventually sent his own narcotics unit shopping. They walked out of Trap Stars, he says, with a pound. (S3)

The store sits in New Buffalo Township, a lakeside community of about 2,500 people on the Indiana line. A September 2025 NPR report repeated a Crain’s estimate of roughly half a billion dollars in annual regional cannabis sales. A later Detroit Free Press report, published March 27, 2026, counted 32 active retail licenses in the township and cited BDSA’s estimate of $231 million in actual 2025 sales. On June 22, the township board advanced findings supporting revocation of Trap Stars’ land-use permit while clearing three other shops. The July 20 board minutes still listed Trap Stars’ federal and state cases as pending litigation. (S3, S17, S19, S21)

The boom was an accident of the border. U.S. 12 crosses from Michigan City, Indiana, and the first building past the "Welcome to Michigan" sign is a dispensary; the parking lots fill with Illinois and Indiana plates. Cannabis is illegal in Indiana and expensive in Chicago, and NPR reported in September 2025 that New Buffalo had grown from six dispensaries the previous year to twenty-six. "The mecca of dispensaries here," laughed Raymond Baker, an Indiana customer who makes the hour drive with his wife Monique, who budgets $200 a visit, money that buys "a ounce less" in Chicago. Township supervisor Michelle Heit conceded the town never planned for it: "There's a lot. There's a lot right now. More than we probably anticipated." (S7, S13)

The township received $1,404,444.60 in state cannabis revenue sharing for fiscal 2025: 26 eligible licenses multiplied by $54,017.10. The roughly $58,200 per-license figure reported for fiscal 2024 came from that same distribution mechanism. It was not a separate annual local fee to add to the $1.4 million. What changed was the enforcement file on one store. The Gander reported on July 22 that Trap Stars had received four regulatory complaints in the preceding year. One February CRA complaint alleged that 528 vape cartridges were logged in Metrc as 76 sales at six and seven cents apiece, all inside 44 minutes on September 30, 2025. Regulators said the store’s surveillance footage did not show the recorded sales. (S5, S6, S16, S18, S20)

“The mecca of dispensaries here. Every time I come back, there's a new one, it seems like.”

— Raymond Baker, cannabis customer from Indiana, to NPR

Trap Stars denies wrongdoing, and its defense is not frivolous. "Trap Star is a business that was established in December 2024, and like many new businesses, there were some minor growing pains that needed to be addressed," said attorney J. Adam Behrendt, calling it "a multi-million dollar investment that employs over 30 people." Several CRA matters, he notes, are resolved, with fines paid; the rest are allegations no tribunal has adjudicated. Of the sheriff's one-pound compliance buy: "Never heard of such a thing, never been charged with that by the CRA, or by the police department, or the sheriff's department." (S3)

The sharper legal question is whether a township can do any of this at all. New Buffalo's February ordinance lets it revoke a shop's special land-use permit for violations of state cannabis rules, making it, according to the lawsuit filed by dispensary Bloomery, "the only municipality in Michigan" to punish state regulatory allegations locally, "effectively position[ing] itself as a parallel enforcement authority" to the CRA. The preemption argument has teeth: even when the state substantiates the kind of violations alleged, its own maximum penalty is often a warning or fine, not closure. Three shops sued; Bloomery won and then lost a restraining order; Trap Stars' case is now in federal court before Judge Paul Maloney in Grand Rapids, and the township’s July 20 minutes listed the federal and state cases as pending litigation. (S19) (S4, S12)

All of it lands on an industry already being squeezed from Lansing. Michigan's roughly $3 billion market shrank by $100 million last year, adult-use revenue is off 5.3 percent in the first half of 2026, flower prices hit a record low in June, and about 1,200 licensees went out of business last year, by one industry attorney's count at the June hearing. A new 24 percent wholesale tax, passed to fund roads, projected at $420 million a year, collected just $34 million in its first quarter and is under challenge in two courts. And a Senate bill would cap retail licenses at one per 10,000 residents statewide; the March count of 32 active retail licenses for roughly 2,500 residents put New Buffalo at about one per 78 residents. "This is a boon for the black market," state Senator Jeff Irwin said of the tax, his warning aimed at exactly the price-sensitive, out-of-state customers who made New Buffalo rich. (S3, S8, S9, S17)

1. Local permit proceedings: the June 22 vote advanced findings against Trap Stars; the July 20 minutes continued to list related litigation as pending.
2. Federal litigation: the township’s authority to enforce state cannabis requirements through its land-use permits remains at issue in the Trap Stars case.
3. The CRA's own unresolved February complaint, the state could act on the license independent of anything the township does.
4. SB 597, the statewide license-cap bill, and the two court challenges to Michigan's 24% wholesale tax now under Supreme Court-ordered review.

The underlying arrangement runs deeper than one permit dispute. State revenue sharing has given the township a substantial financial stake in cannabis retail, while neighboring states keep sending it customers. The Bakers’ trip up U.S. 12 captures that tension: a town benefiting from a trade whose local rules it is still fighting to enforce.

Correction (September 8, 2026): The original article double-counted state revenue sharing as a separate per-store fee and used an outdated retailer count as current. It also described July 20 as a future hearing despite publication on July 29. The figures and procedural references now carry their source dates; an unsupported budget percentage was removed and the complaint period was clarified.

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