Adam Smiddy, whose background includes experience in the military, the tech industry, and politics, now owns the campus-area cannabis shop Midnight Green. | Photo: J. Adrian Wylie
In the fierce fight for Michigan cannabis consumers’ dollars, a new entrant in the dispensary business would best be business-savvy, regulation-ready, and tenaciously competitive.
That’s Adam Smiddy’s cue. The owner of Midnight Green, freshly launched across the street from U-M’s Ross School of Business, wrestled for twelve years, served a decade in the army as a Green Beret, studied biology and chemistry at EMU, and says Ross, where he earned an entrepreneurship award en route to his MBA, “changed the course of my life.”
He’s since been a tech startup CEO, a government consultant, and a Democratic political candidate, earning 18,407 votes in an unsuccessful 2020 bid for state rep in a deep-red district including Howell, where he lives with his wife and two children. “I’m a fun Google,” he acknowledges.
The state’s 2018 legalization of adult-use cannabis “coincided with my experiences as a veteran coming boiling up to the surface a little bit,” he says. “I just rediscovered cannabis and realized how much it was having the ability to help me sleep at night and work through all the things that I had to work through.”
Midnight Green succeeds longtime provisioner Green Planet and the short-lived Meds Cafe in the green corner house on Tappan, refilling a niche as the sole campus-area dispensary south of the Diag.
Related: Cannabis is Back on Tappan (Aug. 2024)
He says that more vertically integrated cannabis companies tend to feature their own products, but the state’s new 24 percent wholesale tax catches that too, blunting their competitive edge in a market of saturated supply.
“There’s over 300 suppliers I can buy from in the state,” he says. “Independents like myself have the ability to go to the best.”
Midnight Green, 700 Tappan. (734) 492–3764. Tues.–Thurs. 11 a.m.–10 p.m., Fri. & Sat. 11 a.m.–midnight, Sun. 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Closed Mon. midnightgreena2.com
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