I live in Michigan and its “legal” here too. They had years of medical here before they went recreational so they had a lot of the kinks worked out. We have a 12 plant grow limit but a court basically nullified it and where i live i could grow an acre and no one would know or even care. We have a 10 or 12oz limit on flower, 15g limit on concentrates and i dont know what it is for edibles. Ive purchased more than 12oz in one day at one store. Stores are locked into a 2.5oz limit on flower/edible, per transaction, 15g per transaction. Some ask you to put each transaction in the car before continuing and some dont care and just do separate ones. No one follows the allowances of personal either, i have a crazy amount of each catagory.
We have a regulatory body that monitors quality pretty closely, requiring all kinds of testing, monitoring all stages and they have levied some pretty heavy fines including banning individuals from ever running or working in MI cannabis industry and closing entire companies and grows for severe violations.
With all that said i absolutely love it. Took a lot of research to find the kind of companies i want to support but it is unreal. I dont remember the last time i paid over 100/oz for flower of fantastic quality, well beyond anything i had in the black market. Popped into one of my favorite places today to grab a couple ounces of outdoor at 45/oz and 18.7% THC, a sativa hybrid, to make a craptop of RSO.
On the flip side tho there are some completely shit companies, in fact there are a lot of them. Prerolls that are stuffed with the lowest grade stuff you can get, almost as bad as the brick buds we grew up on in the 80s, Sugar leaves and stems… Companies that try to sneak non tested out of state flower into their products.
Another shitty thing is now that recreational is legal it is near impossible to find other cannabinoids such as CBD, CBG and CBN products and NO ONE i have found in the legal market sells isolates of any cannabinoids.
A big thing that drives our market is the legality/price in surrounding states and im sure this has had a huge effect on how our market formed. Perhaps is will develop differently there.
In Illinois the experience is entirely different. I went to two dispensaries there and i was actually scared both times, sooooo many police officers. While i found being around that many officers while buying weed a little disconcerting what i was scared of was the reason they were there. I got to talking to one of them and he told me there are been dozens of armed robbery attempts at the first one i went to with two robbers shot. And at the second one there were even more police. And the prices were many many times higher than here.
Thats too many words, sorry. But hopefully it wont be too bad.