Lower North Side Cannabis Guide: Great Falls, Montana

The Missouri River drops over five waterfalls at the north edge of Great Falls, and the hydro dams built to harness them still define the city's geography and its economy. Add Malmstrom Air Force Base and its intercontinental missile wing on the east side, Benefis Health System downtown, and a farm-and-ranch trade area covering most of north-central Montana, and you get a city of roughly sixty thousand that behaves like a much bigger one on weekends.

Cascade County backed I-190 in 2020, so recreational sales began here in January 2022 without any local fight. The county added its 3% local-option tax in early 2023, putting a recreational purchase at 23% total and leaving cardholders at 4% plus the local add-on. The base complicates everything else. Several thousand active-duty airmen and their families live in and around the city, and federal military law prohibits cannabis absolutely, so a substantial part of the population is legally locked out of a market operating a few blocks away.

Retail follows the commercial spine. Tenth Avenue South, the four-lane strip that runs from the river past the Holiday Village Mall out toward the base, carries the most counters, including Green Creek Montana at 1826 10th Avenue South. Elevated runs its Great Falls store just over the river in Black Eagle as one of more than a dozen it operates statewide, Top Shelf Botanicals and Seed of Life Labs both hold locations here, Holistic Releaf By Design keeps counters on 10th Avenue North and Black Eagle Road, and Infinity Wellness sits on 11th Street and 6th Street Southwest. Frosteez and Lionheart Cannabis round out the statewide names with counters in town.

Initiative 190 carried Montana with about 57% of the vote in November 2020. Adult possession turned legal on January 1, 2021, and the first recreational receipts printed exactly one year later. By January 2026 the state had crossed $1 billion in cumulative adult-use revenue, and 2025 finished as the biggest year yet at roughly $327 million in combined medical and recreational sales, about 90% of that recreational. Cannabis is now a normal part of main-street commerce here, with one of the highest storefront-per-resident ratios in the country.

The thing that confuses visitors is the county map. Adult-use retail is allowed only where a majority backed I-190 - the green counties - while the red half of Montana stays closed until its own voters flip it. Custer County did exactly that in November 2024, and Miles City started selling recreational product on January 1, 2025. Cities get a say too. Billings voters barred adult-use storefronts inside the city limits in November 2021, which is why the recreational shops serving Billings sit in Lockwood and Laurel instead.

Money and limits are simple once you know them. Recreational purchases carry a 20% state tax; a registered patient pays 4%. Most counties tack on a local-option tax of up to 3%. The daily ceiling is one ounce of flower, and inside that ounce you may not exceed 8 grams of concentrate or 800 milligrams of edible THC. Two mature plants and two seedlings per adult are legal at home, locked and out of sight.

Two changes reshaped 2025 and 2026. SB 375 and HB 49 pulled almost every hemp-derived THC gummy and seltzer off gas-station coolers, pushing that demand into licensed stores. Then HB 636 cut edible servings from 10 milligrams to 5 on July 1, 2026, so the gummy you bought last spring is packaged differently now.

Montana retail is dominated by vertically integrated homegrown chains rather than national multistate operators. The names you will see across multiple towns include Bloom Montana, Lionheart Cannabis, Top Shelf Botanicals, Elevated, Lone Peak Cannabis Company, SweetGrass, Seed of Life Labs, Frosteez, Honey Sour, Dancing Goat Gardens, and Apogee Gardens. Because the same license covers cultivation and the sales floor, house-grown flower usually carries the store name on the jar, and the in-house cartridge or gummy line is the cheapest thing on the menu. Cross-shopping matters more here than brand loyalty: a strain that costs $12 a gram in one town may be $7 forty miles away.

Prices keep sliding while volume climbs: 2025 set a sales record even as per-gram pricing fell, and the first five months of 2026 ran ahead of 2025 on the recreational side while medical kept shrinking. SB 27 froze new licenses through June 30, 2027, so the shop count is fixed and competition is playing out on price and loyalty programs instead of new storefronts. Red counties holding opt-in votes are the only source of new territory.