Tongue River Cannabis Guide: Miles City, Montana

Miles City sits where the Tongue River meets the Yellowstone, a cattle town that has been shipping livestock since the 1880s and still holds the Bucking Horse Sale every May, the rodeo weekend that doubles the population and defines the local calendar. Fort Keogh, the old cavalry post west of town, is now a federal livestock research station. About eighty-three hundred people live here, and the town serves a ranching trade area that runs a long way in every direction across southeast Montana.

The cannabis story here is different from the rest of this guide. Custer County voted against I-190 in 2020, which made it a red county where possession was legal but recreational storefronts were not. That held until the November 5, 2024 general election, when county voters approved opting in, and recreational sales began on January 1, 2025. The city council spent the end of 2024 adding recreational businesses to its existing dispensary regulations, setting basic rules on where such a store may open while a larger zoning rework was still in progress.

SweetGrass operates a Miles City dispensary, part of an operation that also runs a Red Lodge store, and it carries Montana-made lines alongside its own product. Retail here follows Main Street and the Haynes Avenue commercial strip near the interstate, which is where the motels, fuel, and chain restaurants sit at exit 138. For a town that waited three years longer than Billings or Missoula, the market is still young and the customer base is still learning what a legal counter offers.

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 July 1, 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.