As Michigan's marijuana industry blooms, prices of both medical and recreational marijuana have steadily dropped.
According to the latest reporting from the state's Marijuana Regulatory Agency, the price per ounce of recreational marijuana was $516.21 in December, when the sales first started, and dropped to $409.76 in May, the most recent month that MRA reported. Meanwhile, medical marijuana was $267.30 per ounce in December and dropped to $251.50 in May.
As of July 15, the state has authorized cultivators to grow 511,500 plants, a 20% increase from about two months earlier. The price of pot is expected to continue to drop as more licenses are granted, but MRA Director Andrew Brisbo says that the agency wants to avoid them falling too far. "What we need to be cautious about and be wary of is what happened in Oregon," he told MLive, "where the scale shifted and there was oversupply, because then the price kind of bottoms out."
In the past few years, the price of marijuana in Oregon plummeted due to a supply surplus, becoming the nation's cheapest weed. (One study found it would take at least six years for the state's 4 million residents to smoke the entire stock. Due to federal prohibition of marijuana, it's not possible to simply export it to other states.)
This year, the price of marijuana began to climb again in Oregon, due in part growers going out of business because of the supply-and-demand issues.