Tribal cannabis thriving as red state Montana still struggling with regulation

In the earliest years of interested party this columnist advocated for a craft cannabis industry informed by a synthesis of statutes that empower organic gardeners, microbreweries, vintners, greenhouses, banking, fiduciary and insurance participation with ways and means hammered out in committee by each state legislature to guide enforcement. Patients seeking a prescription for cannabis as medication would be seen by health care providers and be excused from paying any excise taxes.

After Montana legalized therapeutic cannabis in 2004 discussions about growing the industry on tribal lands began in 2010 with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai (CSKT). The then-purple state legalized for all adults over 21 in 2020 then opened for business in 2022 but because tribes are sovereign nations, state legalization did not automatically apply inside reservation boundaries. 

In 2025, the now-red state legislature passed a bill that included compacts that would govern tax revenue sharing, cultivation limits and how tribally-owned dispensaries would operate on or near reservations but was vetoed by the governor so each tribe chooses how to regulate the enterprise. 

The Montana Department of Revenue is authorized to issue a total of eight "Combined-Use" licenses that allows exactly one license for each of the eight federally recognized tribes in Montana or an entity majority-owned by a tribe. The state caps tribal cultivation under these specific state licenses at a Tier 1 canopy level, the smallest commercial grow size, which remains a point of regulatory friction. A combined-use license permits the tribe to run both a cultivation facility and a dispensary at a single premises and the Crow Nation passed its own independent cannabis ordinance to levy its own local taxes and regulate manufacturing while other reservations remain entirely dry or prohibit sales. 

Tribal entities can operate these facilities within a 150 air-mile radius of the exterior boundaries of their reservation, or tribal services area for the Little Shell Chippewa tribe, provided the host county allows adult-use sales. In 2026, N8V Grown is renowned as Montana’s most trusted dispensary offering premium cannabis products. Founded by an enrolled member of the Chippewa Cree Tribe the award-winning, Indigenous-owned and operated business that takes immense pride in its heritage and commitment to excellence has expanded from locations near reservations to a retail location outside of Billings because Yellowstone County is green but the city is not.

The Flathead Indian Reservation spans parts of Lake, Sanders, Missoula, and Flathead counties and the CSKT operates as a sovereign entity with its own codified laws regarding possession and distribution. 

But white people are struggling how to regulate the industry in the Flathead Valley. Local county commissioners faced fierce public pushback over how to manage the market so in 2022 they attempted to host a public vote to completely opt out of "recreational" cannabis sales sparking protests at the downtown Kalispell courthouse before the county ultimately backed down.

Today, zoning laws vary statewide as jurisdictions navigate the recreational cannabis industry under the Department of Revenue, which had previously been housed under the Department of Health and Human Services. City and county officials over the last four years have been directing dispensary owners where to cultivate, process and dispense cannabis to allow their businesses to operate while avoiding community conflict. Flathead County in 2023 limited cultivation and manufacturing to agricultural and residential zones, meaning some owners could not grow their plants in business zones where their product is sold. This requires many business owners to operate separate facilities in multiple locations to cultivate, manufacture and dispense their products. [Flathead Beacon]

Wage slaves sustain South Dakota's economy

Today’s intersection? Diversity, equity, and inclusion: Trump state economies are in the toilet according to Creighton University's Ernie Goss but it's not about laziness, it's about Maria shrugged, if you will. 

In 2022 an interested party phoned the son of an old friend who took over his dad's successful painting business based in Spearditch and asked him whether Spanish speakers still do much of the work in the trades. He said many drive back and forth from Gillette, Wyoming after the collapse of the coal industry and Lawrence County's property crimes and violence among rival workers peaked in 2018 but now Rapid City sees the bulk of the construction site thefts, drunken brawls and housing overcrowding. He told me that in Hill City Spanish speakers became the only applicants for employment at the sawmill so after Donald Trump was forced from office Jim Neiman shuttered it. 

South Dakota is home to about 39,900 recent immigrants or about 4.3% of the state's population and more than 280 refugees resettled in South Dakota during the fiscal year 2024 compared to 206 in all of 2023. So, the extreme white wing in South Dakota is losing it not because nearly half of students qualify for free or reduced lunches and some 3,500 students receive special education support but because new residents in South Dakota are migrants from Muslim countries like Afghanistan, South Sudan and Ethiopia. 

Nebraska and Iowa are also seeing surges in immigration but Brookings and Moody Counties in South Dakota are homes to more people from Guatemala and other Central American nations.

Working-age adults between 18 and 64 have represented the largest share of people moving into South Dakota from other states every year from 2021 through 2024, according to an analysis of Census Bureau migration estimates. During that period, an average of about 21,000 working-age adults moved into South Dakota each year, compared with about 5,000 children and 2,000 retirees. [SD News Watch]

Religionism is what these climate refugees and migrant workers have in common with their Midwest counterparts and "pro-life" is simply code for white people breeding because African-Americans terminate pregnancies at about the same per capita rate as white people do but don’t take their jobs. Latinas, however, have fewer abortions per capita and the extreme white wing of the Republican Party knows it's hemorrhaging jobs to Latinos.

South Dakota is the hardest-working state, in part because 6.5% of workers have multiple jobs, the 11th-highest percentage in the country. Although this may not be an ideal situation, indicating that people’s main jobs are not paying them enough, it’s still a testament to how hard South Dakota residents are willing to work. In addition, South Dakota has the fifth-lowest share of “idle youth” – people ages 18 to 24 who are not in school, are not working and have no school experience beyond a high school diploma. [WalletHub]

They're eating the horses!

Some horses sold by the Bureau of Land Management move through livestock dealers and toward slaughter despite the Trump Organization's insistence that it does not sell free-roaming horses for meat.

Image h/t: @thesandboxchannel.bsky.social

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— David Waldman (@kagrox.bsky.social) August 23, 2026 at 11:34 AM

Reich Mike Rounds moves to the middle as Bengs advances

Rotund reprobate rescuer Reich Mike Rounds is rattled.

With Brian Bengs forcing the South Dakota US Senate race to the center career politician Rounds says he and Democratic Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar want to return some cropland to grasslands. In my home state of South Dakota some eight million acres are salt-impacted due to seawater intrusion, fertilizer and other soil amendments, irrigation with saline water and roadway deicer applications. But, Minnesota is struggling with nitrate pollution, too.

Soils are worn out from decades of pesticides, poor farming practices and manufactured fertilizers. Aquifer sources are not considered high quality for irrigation because of their salinity levels and fossil water from limestone contains the minerals that made us human but shallow wells and waterways suffer impairment from nitrate pollution making water less available especially where aquifer levels are dwindling. 

Traditional deep-rooted prairie grasses and diverse small-grain rotations have largely been replaced by heavy corn and soybean rotations allowing the water table to rise and deposit more salt at the surface. Expanding white and brown saline patches force farmers into a loop of spending money on seeds that fail to emerge exposing the trade-off between short-term financial profitability and long-term soil health. 

Farmers would sign 10- to 15-year contracts and establish and maintain perennial grasses or non-woody vegetation like wildflowers, buckwheat or radishes. The program has additional incentives for beginning farmers and ranchers, and would prioritize contracts for poorly performing and highly erodible cropland. It would also pay landowners at a rate based on the land’s cropland value, rather than its pastureland value, which would amount to larger payments. [South Dakota Searchlight]

Yes, socialized agriculture, socialized dairies, socialized cheese, socialized livestock production, a socialized timber industry, socialized air service, socialized freight rail, a socialized nursing home industry, socialized water systems, a socialized internet and socialized infrastructure are all fine with Republicans in South Dakota but then they insist single-payer medical insurance is socialized medicine.

Big Money Mike Rounds has sat by and let the national debt more than DOUBLE in his time as a senator.

He’s rubber stamped runaway spending, tax cuts for Wall Street, and is sticking America’s children with the bill. pic.twitter.com/anqxKftXwV

— Brian Bengs (@BrianBengs) August 19, 2026

White people in South Dakota still too stupid to manage cannabis industry

With tribes in Minnesota, Nebraska and Wyoming showing white people how to cultivate, inspect and market cannabis South Dakota is still dragging behind. Nevertheless, the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s cannabis industry brings in about $700,000 annually through fees and taxes and currently there are 11 dispensaries, 11 processors and nine cultivators across that tribal nation. 

Even as home growing surged a thousand percent in the horrible red state with a reactionary Earth hater as attorney general advocates know South Dakota is leaving money on the table. But if the neanderthal South Dakota Legislature had any integrity or ethics (they don’t) they would empower the tribal nations trapped in South Dakota to be the sole cannabis producers, inspectors and distributors in the state (they won't).

Nicole Ezeh, law and public safety legislative director for the National Conference of State Legislatures, spoke to the state’s [therapeutic] cannabis board Monday. “The recreational states will still be in a bifurcated system where half of the regulatory scheme that deals with [therapeutic] cannabis products will be under schedule three, but adult use products will still be under schedule one still,” Ezeh said. [Bill Janklow's idea of public radio]

Learn more at South Dakota Searchlight.