Lowe v. City of Detroit

Last verified: April 2026

The Plaintiff — Crystal Lowe

Crystal Lowe was a Detroit-area cannabis industry worker who had lived in Detroit for ten of the prior thirty years — short of the 15-year threshold the original Detroit Legacy ordinance required for full Legacy status. Her mother had a cannabis conviction, but it occurred when Crystal was 19, not before her 18th birthday as the ordinance required.

Lowe was, in legal terms, the perfect plaintiff for a Dormant Commerce Clause challenge: she was a Detroit-adjacent cannabis worker who fell just short of the residency threshold the city had set. Her case demonstrated the practical exclusionary effect of the residency rule on people who had genuine connection to Detroit but did not meet the long-tail durational requirements.

The Procedural Path

Represented by Kevin Blair of Honigman LLP, Lowe filed suit in Wayne County Circuit Court on March 2, 2021. The City removed it to the Eastern District of Michigan; the case was assigned to Judge Bernard A. Friedman, a Reagan appointee with a long civil-rights docket. The case was assigned the docket number 2:21-cv-10709.

• March 2, 2021 — Lowe files in Wayne County Circuit Court
• April 7, 2021 — Friedman issues a temporary restraining order halting the licensing process
• June 17, 2021 — Friedman issues a preliminary injunction

Friedman’s Opinion

Friedman’s June 17, 2021 opinion did not pull punches:

• The ordinance’s “favoritism” toward long-term residents was “far more protectionist than it is equitable”
• The ordinance was “likely unconstitutional” under both the Dormant Commerce Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment
• The 15-year residency requirement was not “narrowly tailored” to remedy the documented harms of cannabis prohibition
• The 10-year-residency-plus-parental-conviction alternative similarly failed narrow-tailoring review

The Constitutional Theory

Friedman’s ruling rested on two constitutional theories:

Dormant Commerce Clause

The Dormant Commerce Clause prohibits state and local governments from discriminating against interstate commerce. Friedman applied that doctrine to cannabis residency rules despite cannabis’s federal Schedule I status — a position the First Circuit (2022, in NPG v. Maine) and Second Circuit (2025, in Variscite NY One) have since adopted, and which the Ninth Circuit explicitly rejected in January 2026 in Peridot Tree WA. The federal circuit split is now a likely Supreme Court question. See DCC Circuit Split.

Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection

A 15-year residency requirement is the kind of long-tail durational test the Supreme Court has repeatedly subjected to strict scrutiny under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause and the Privileges and Immunities Clause. Detroit had not articulated a sufficiently narrow tailoring between the 15-year requirement and the harms of prohibition.

The Poison-Pill Clause

The original ordinance contained an unusual poison-pill clause: if struck down, it would automatically repeal itself and prohibit all adult-use establishments in Detroit. The clause was, in effect, a legislative assertion that Detroit would rather have no adult-use market at all than have an adult-use market without the equity preference.

Blair, Lowe’s attorney, told Grown In he believed the clause was inserted because city leaders “knew this was unconstitutional.” The poison-pill ultimately did not trigger because Detroit let the original ordinance lapse and pivoted to a new ordinance under a different structural design.

What Detroit Did Next

Rather than appeal Friedman’s ruling or trigger the poison-pill, Mayor Duggan and Council Member Tate pivoted. The City Council approved a revised ordinance 8-1 in April 2022 that:

1. Split equity and non-equity applicants into separate licensing tracks
2. Replaced Detroit-only residency with state-defined social equity (Michigan’s MRTMA SEE definition)
3. Demoted Legacy Detroiter from licensing-eligibility to a support category (mentoring, financing, city-property opportunities)

The first 33 licenses under the revised ordinance were awarded December 22, 2022 — 18 months after Friedman’s injunction.

The Wayne County Follow-On Litigation

On August 30, 2022, Wayne County Circuit Judge Leslie Kim Smith dismissed two follow-on lawsuits challenging the revised ordinance, calling it “unambiguous” and “a fair licensing process.” The dismissals cleared the way for the Round 1 awards in December 2022.

The Broader Significance

Lowe v. City of Detroit is the leading municipal-level case study in the broader national legal collision between cannabis equity programs and the Dormant Commerce Clause. Cities and states designing cannabis equity programs across the country now operate under the shadow of Lowe — either avoiding residency-anchored designs entirely (Chicago, post-MRTA New York) or risking the same federal-court strike-down that hit Detroit. The Detroit two-track rebuild has become a constitutionally durable template that other cities have studied.

Sixth Circuit and Supreme Court

Detroit did not appeal Friedman’s preliminary injunction to the Sixth Circuit; the city’s pivot to the 2022 revised ordinance effectively mooted the case. The DCC question has migrated to the First, Second, and Ninth Circuits via state-level cannabis litigation, and the resulting circuit split makes Supreme Court resolution likely within the next 18–24 months.

Related on this site: The Detroit Equity Ordinance Fight, Detroit Office of Cannabis Affairs &a..., The 2022 Revised Ordinance.