A funny thing happened on my drive through Michigan recently: I couldn’t escape the cannabis dispensaries everywhere — no fewer than five within a ten-minute drive of Paw Paw, a village of fewer than four thousand people. There’s an entire industry dedicated to marketing and advertising weed, which has become a billion-dollar industry in the Wolverine State. Dispensaries are particularly clustered along the western border with Indiana, where cannabis possession is still prohibited even as leaf and edibles flow in over the Michigan and Illinois borders, where it’s legal for recreational use. Everyone who cares to partake is able to do so virtually without restriction, even as a quarter of a million people in the state still bear the burden of drug convictions handed out prior to legalization in 2018.

Similar situations can be found in other states as local economies, reeling from lost industry, lack of investment and infrastructure, and COVID-related job loss, look for some way — any way — to bring in revenue. Today’s cannabis dispensary is 2016’s vape store is 2012’s craft brewery.

Nevada once had one of the strictest anti-drug policies in America; a billboard outside of town, immortalized in Hunter S. Thompson’s notorious Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, urged motorists not to “gamble” with the drug and warned of prison sentences of twenty years to life. Now, with Nevada home to one of the biggest and most profitable legal cannabis industries in the country, you can buy novelty key rings replicating that billboard in the same places you buy weed. Culture and politics often run counter to economic necessity: in Oklahoma, a generally conservative state that just passed the country’s most restrictive ban on abortion, recreational weed isn’t yet legal, but there are thousands of medical dispensaries — one for every two thousand residents.