Southroads Cannabis Guide: Bellevue, Nebraska

Bellevue is the oldest continuously settled town in Nebraska and the state third-largest city, but the fact that shapes everything here is Offutt Air Force Base and United States Strategic Command sitting inside the city limits. Tens of thousands of active-duty members, civilian employees and cleared contractors live in Bellevue, and for every one of them a Nebraska medical recommendation is legally worthless. Federal employment and security clearance rules treat marijuana as prohibited, full stop, and the April 2026 federal move of medical cannabis to Schedule III did not change military policy.

The retail picture is equally blank. Sarpy and Cass counties form the Second Judicial District, roughly 217,000 residents, and commission rules allow one dispensary for the pair. That single store would have to serve Bellevue, Papillion, La Vista, Gretna, Springfield and Plattsmouth. No application window for it has opened. The one nearby cannabis business of any kind is a cultivator: Midwest Cultivator Group won approval in June 2026 to relocate its grow to Gretna after conditional-use approval there.

Commercially, Bellevue runs along a few clear spines. Fort Crook Road North carries the older retail between the base and Olde Towne, Galvin Road threads past Bellevue University, Highway 370 pulls the newer shopping toward Twin Creek, and Cornhusker Road handles the western growth. Vape and hemp counters sit scattered on all four. Any operator eyeing the Second District dispensary license would be shopping general retail frontage on exactly those roads.

Nebraska is the rarest kind of cannabis state: the medicine is legal to hold, and there is no lawful place to buy it. Initiative 437 took the penalties off patients who possess up to five ounces with a health care practitioner recommendation, and Initiative 438 created the Nebraska Medical Cannabis Commission to license the supply chain. Both took effect in December 2024 after 71 percent and 67 percent approval. Everything since has been implementation, and implementation has been slow.

The commission is housed inside the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission, and the three liquor commissioners sit on it alongside two gubernatorial appointees. It offered its first cultivator licenses in October 2025, a week past the deadline voters wrote into law. All four allowed cultivator licenses are now held. The first legal plants went in the ground after MahaMota Cultivation Company in Raymond cleared inspection in June 2026. Product manufacturer applications opened that same month. No dispensary application window has been announced.

What a Nebraska dispensary will eventually sell is already narrower than anywhere else in the country. Permanent regulations signed by Gov. Jim Pillen on July 1, 2026 prohibit raw flower, pre-rolls, vapes, anything smokable, and edibles of any kind. Tablets, capsules, tinctures, topicals, suppositories, transdermal patches and nebulizer liquids are the legal forms. Purchases are capped at five ounces per 30 days with no more than five grams of delta-9 THC from one dispensary.

Retail is capped at 12 stores statewide, one per judicial district, plus four cultivators and four product manufacturers. Medical cannabis is not subject to sales tax under current Nebraska law. On September 4, 2026 the Nebraska Supreme Court unanimously rejected the last challenge to the 2024 petitions, which removes the biggest legal cloud over the program.

There are no Nebraska dispensary brands yet because no dispensary has been licensed. What does exist is a public list of licensed cultivators: MahaMota Cultivation Company in Raymond, which cleared inspection in June 2026 and put the first legal plants in Nebraska soil; KRL Med LLC in Washington County, held up by a county zoning reversal; Meadowlark Medicinals, which postponed its inspection; and Midwest Cultivator Group, approved in June 2026 to relocate from Omaha to Gretna. Those four are the entire legal supply chain upstream of a store. On the hemp side, buy nothing without a current certificate of analysis showing total THC, and understand that the attorney general considers many of those products illegal marijuana.

Three things move the Nebraska story between now and January. The commission still has to set application fees, open a dispensary window, score applicants and inspect buildings, and it has been running that gauntlet at roughly one meeting a month. The provider problem is bigger: advocates say no Nebraska physician has publicly signed up to recommend, and the 2026 bill that would have shielded them from license complaints failed. Then there is hemp - the federal total-THC definition lands in December 2026, and Sen. Kathleen Kauth's state ban died with the biennium in April.