Michigan's Richest Weed Town Is Trying to Shut Down Exactly 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 twenty-square-mile lakeside community of about 2,500 people on the Indiana line that has become, by Crain's reckoning, Michigan's most lucrative cannabis market: 26 licensed retailers — more than one per hundred residents, the third-most of any municipality in the state — doing an estimated half-billion dollars a year, $35 to $40 million a month, by a House of Dank executive's estimate. Nearly all of it drives in from Chicago and Indiana. And after a year of resident revolt, new ordinances and lawsuits from three dispensaries, the township's crackdown has narrowed to a single target: on June 22 the board voted 5–0 to establish findings supporting revocation of Trap Stars' land-use permit while clearing three other shops, with a second hearing set for July 20. (S1, S2, S3, S11, S15)

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 New Buffalo went from six dispensaries to twenty-six in roughly a year. "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, it should be said, has been paid handsomely by the industry it is now policing: $58,000 a year per dispensary in fees plus a $1.4 million excise distribution — money that bought a fire truck and funds firefighter pay, roads and trails. What changed was the enforcement file on one store. Trap Stars Outlet, opened in December 2024 by PER III, LLC, has drawn four formal complaints from Michigan's Cannabis Regulatory Agency since October: a $6,500 fine after a complaint alleged a single customer bought more than four pounds and was later stopped in Indiana; a $9,000 fine for tracked inventory that went missing; and, most striking, a February complaint alleging that 528 vape cartridges were logged in the state's Metrc system as 76 sales at six and seven cents apiece — all inside 44 minutes of one September morning — sales the store's own surveillance video, regulators say, does not show happening. (S4, S5, S6, S16)

“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, with the township's motion to dismiss and the store's preliminary-injunction motion both pending. (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; New Buffalo Township's ratio is one per hundred. "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)

1. July 20 — the township board's second revocation hearing on Trap Stars, following new allegations that surfaced mid-hearing in June.
2. Judge Maloney's rulings — the township's motion to dismiss and Trap Stars' preliminary-injunction motion are fully briefed in the Western District of Michigan.
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.

Whatever the board decides on July 20, the deeper arrangement is not on the agenda. The township will keep collecting its $58,000 per store. The Bakers will keep driving up U.S. 12 past the welcome sign. And the first thing they'll see in Michigan will still be a dispensary — 25 of them, at minimum, in a town that has discovered it can live handsomely off the trade it polices, one revoked permit at a time.

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