Meg Sanders calls it “a huge threat.”
She’s referring to a question that might be put to Massachusetts voters on Election Day in November, seeking to undo the state’s 2016 legalization of recreational, or adult-use, cannabis.
“We’re concerned if nobody comes out and votes; it’s an off-year election, and overall, America is not great about voting,” said Sanders, CEO of Canna Provisions, which just opened its third Massachusetts dispensary this month in Pittsfield, to complement its existing stores in Lee and Holyoke.
“If you’re in cannabis, you have to understand how civics and government policy work,” she added. “Anti-cannabis groups have raised $10 million for this battle. And if we do nothing, if we don’t raise the dollars they have, they have a very good chance of winning.”
The ballot measure’s main goal is to end legal, recreational cannabis by repealing the laws that made the trade permissible in the Bay State. That means closing adult-use dispensaries and ending the regulated retail market, eliminating home growing, banning personal cultivation, and scaling back possession; adults could still possess around 1 ounce without criminal penalties, while larger amounts could bring civil fines instead of full criminal charges.
Medical marijuana would remain legal; the proposal generally keeps the medical cannabis system in place, though potentially with tighter rules. As a result, Massachusetts would shift from a fully legal, taxed, commercial cannabis market to one with no legal recreational sales, limited personal possession, and medical-only legal access.
The name of the repeal initiative is “An Act to Restore a Sensible Marijuana Policy,” and that’s problematic on its own, Sanders said.
MassBudget Reference:
Jessica Troe, deputy director of Research and Policy Analysis for the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, spoke before the recent legislative panel as well, touting the economic benefits of legal cannabis — specifically, a statistic that about $2 billion has flowed into state and local coffers between 2018, when adult-use dispensaries opened, and 2025.
Those funds come from fees, fines, licenses, and permits, as well as a state excise tax, local sales taxes and environmental impact taxes, and other sources, much of it earmarked at the state level to public health and social equity program spending, and locally to whatever cities and towns prioritize.
“This typically goes into the general fund for cities and towns, and that goes to local spending to support various local services and programs,” she noted, later noting that some of these revenue streams have leveled off somewhat.
“The cannabis industry in Massachusetts, as in the rest of the country, continues to evolve and mature, and revenue for the state and cities and towns has started to plateau slightly,” Troe said. “But there is potential for future increases in revenue and more opportunities to advance social equity via the cannabis industry with the rollout of social consumption and cannabis cafés coming to the Commonwealth.”
By social equity, of course, Troe refers to the effort to use cannabis regulations and revenue benefits to help communities that were disproportionately harmed by the War on Drugs. To illustrate those impacts, she noted that, in 2017, the last year before recreational cannabis sales began, Black and Latino residents comprised 22% of the Massachusetts population, but 57% of its prisoners, and 75% of those convictions were mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession.
