Michigan has thrown another curve ball at the state’s medical cannabis program. On Tuesday, officials with the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs published a list of more than a dozen terms medical marijuana dispensaries can no longer use.
Call Them What You Want, But Medical Marijuana Shops In Michigan Can No Longer Call Themselves Dispensaries
In a first for a medical cannabis state, retail providers of medical cannabis can no longer call themselves dispensaries. They cannot use the term in a store name, any branding, or any advertising.
“Dispensary” isn’t the only word Michigan regulators have nixed. State regulators are banning the use of 16 terms they say cannot apply to medical marijuana stores.
Beyond “dispensary,” the list includes other terms that commonly crop up in dispensary names. And then there are some that would be odd for a cannabis shop.
“Pharmacy,” “drug store,” “medicine store,” and even the more mystical “apothecary” are now strictly verboten. But so are more technical terms like “licensed pharmacy technician,” “doctor of pharmacy,” “certified pharmacy technician” or any of their abbreviations.
Before getting into etymological debates about the appropriateness of each term—”apothecary,” after all, comes from a Greek word that simply means “storehouse”—Michigan’s reason for the list has nothing to do with the accuracy of the terms themselves.
Rather, rules in Part 177 of the Michigan Public Health code state that only people who’ve met certain qualifications can use those terms. And budtenders at medical cannabis shops aren’t likely to meet those qualifications.
If Michigan’s dispensaries fail to comply, they risk losing eligibility for a license.
Michigan Dispensaries Must Re-Brand as ‘Provisioning Centers’
So shops must now stop using the most common term(s) for