💸 The Tape

Ten years after Massachusetts voters legalized adult-use cannabis, the numbers are in. The regulated market has produced more than $10 billion in cumulative sales, roughly $2 billion in state and local tax revenue, and nearly 20,000 registered workers across 782 operating businesses. Teen use has fallen by half. And on November 3, voters will be asked to repeal all of it by a campaign that is funded almost entirely from outside the state and that had to be caught on tape lying to get on the ballot.

The run-rate

The Cannabis Control Commission crossed $10 billion in gross adult-use sales on September 5, a milestone reached in just under eight years of retail. The market is no longer growing explosively, but it is growing reliably. Calendar 2025 produced $1.65 billion in sales. Through August, 2026 was tracking at $1.09 billion, including a record $156 million in June, which puts the full-year pace at roughly $1.6 to 1.7 billion. CCC executive director Travis Ahern’s framing is accurate: the industry “now reliably generates more than $1.5 billion in gross sales annually.”

That revenue carries a 10.75% state excise, a 6.25% sales tax and a local option tax of up to 3%, for an effective rate near 20%. In fiscal 2026 the combined take was approximately $336 million, including more than $43 million in local option revenue paid directly to the cities and towns that host dispensaries. Over the program’s life the state and municipalities have collected about $2 billion, money that funds public health programs, the regulatory apparatus itself, and general revenue in a state with a structural budget gap.

It’s also a jobs story. The CCC counts nearly 20,000 registered agents representing about 15,000 individual employees, in cultivation, manufacturing, retail, testing and delivery. More than 100 of the state’s operating businesses are equity-owned or operated. Repeal doesn’t just end sales. It eliminates every one of those positions and every dollar of that tax base, and it hands the demand back to an unregulated market that pays nothing, tests nothing and cards no one.

The teen-use question

The Yes on 8 campaign’s central claim is that legalization “amplified” youth use. The state’s own survey data say the opposite. Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey results show past-30-day marijuana use among high schoolers at 24.5% in 2015, the last survey before legalization, and 12.0% in 2025. That’s a 51% decline. The CCC’s own analysis found daily or near-daily use among 16-to-20-year-olds fell by roughly half between 2019 and 2023, to 7%, while the share who had never tried cannabis rose nine points. Nationally, SAMHSA puts past-month use among 12-to-17-year-olds at 5% in 2025, down from 6.1% in 2021, and CDC data show teen use at a 30-year low.

When the Boston Globe pressed the repeal campaign on this, Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts spokesperson Wendy Wakeman’s answer was that “the research has not been done.” The research has been done. It has been done by the state, by the CDC, by SAMHSA and by the commission that regulates the industry, and it points one direction. Experts quoted by the Globe, including addiction specialists who remain concerned about potency and adolescent exposure, said the feared “tidal wave” of teen use never arrived and that they’d rather see tighter regulation than repeal.

Who’s actually behind Question 8

Here’s where the campaign gets interesting, and not in a good way.

The measure appears on the ballot as “An Act to Restore Sensible Marijuana Policy,” and its structure is deliberately counterintuitive: a Yes vote ends legal sales and home cultivation; a No vote keeps the current system. Signature gatherers working for an out-of-state firm were recorded telling voters the petition was about unrelated issues. One was fired after Marijuana Moment’s reporting. Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe behind Super Troopers, cut a two-minute ad for the No side built entirely around that confusion, with Kevin Heffernan deadpanning that he was told the petition was about “breastfeeding and bowling alleys.”

The money tells the rest. The Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts has raised more than $3 million, and according to WGBH’s review of campaign finance filings, the “overwhelming majority” came from a single source: the fundraising arm of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the Virginia-based prohibition group co-founded by Kevin Sabet. SAM is the same organization currently litigating against federal rescheduling in the D.C. Circuit and pushing to reopen the DEA hearing. Its Massachusetts playbook isn’t new; SAM Action spent $128,600 against the state’s 2024 psychedelics initiative.

Sabet’s defense is that Massachusetts voters “feel betrayed” by the 2016 result. That’s a strange claim coming from a man who doesn’t vote in Massachusetts, funding a campaign that needed deception to qualify. The No side, by contrast, is led by the Committee for Responsible Cannabis Policy, formed by members of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership and run by Diane Goldstein, a 21-year law enforcement veteran, with industry money from INSA and Ascend alongside it. The opposition to Question 8 includes Governor Healey, Senators Warren and Markey, Representative Pressley, the House Speaker, the Senate President and more than 50 state legislators. Warren’s framing is the operative one: “legalizing cannabis is better than continuing an unregulated, underground market.”

The polling and the stakes

MassINC’s September poll had 61% of likely voters opposed to repeal and 27% in favor. That’s a comfortable margin, and the measure is likely to fail. But ballot questions with confusing wording and a late advertising push can close gaps, and SAM’s $3 million is specifically designed to exploit the Yes-means-No structure among low-information voters.

For operators, the stakes are existential in the literal sense. Massachusetts is a capped, mature market where MSOs like Curaleaf, Green Thumb, Verano and Ascend hold the maximum three retail licenses each and have spent years building out cultivation. Repeal would strand that capital, eliminate a $1.6 billion revenue base and reverse the only state-level legalization in U.S. history. For the industry’s national opponents, that’s the point. Massachusetts is the test case. If a prohibition group can buy a repeal in a deep-blue state with a functioning market and falling teen use, every other adult-use state becomes a target.

The voters have the data. The question is whether they read the ballot carefully enough to use it.

📈 Dog Walkers

$ACB ( ▲ 0.52% ) ATM Stays!

The Alberta Securities Commission dismissed Curaleaf’s application to halt Aurora Cannabis’s at-the-market equity program on Monday, handing Aurora a procedural win in a takeover fight that has been short on them.

Curaleaf had argued the ATM functioned as an improper defensive tactic, a way for Aurora to dilute shareholders and inflate the share count mid-bid. Aurora’s counter was chronological: the program was publicly announced in February 2026, more than six months before Curaleaf went hostile, and hasn’t been used since August 18, before the bid launched. The ASC agreed, and Aurora is now treating the dismissal as confirmation that the program “is compliant with securities laws.”

Miguel Martin, Aurora’s executive chairman and CEO, used the ruling to restate the board’s position: Curaleaf’s revised bid “significantly undervalues Aurora” and seeks its cash, EU-GMP assets and global growth platform “at a discount.” The board’s October 14 Notice of Change unanimously recommends shareholders reject the bid, take no action, and withdraw any shares already tendered, while it reviews “all available strategic alternatives.”

Here’s what the ruling doesn’t do. It doesn’t change the economics of Curaleaf’s offer, which stands at 0.4013 CURA shares plus $1.00 cash, capped at US$5.00, with a December 4 expiry. It doesn’t resolve the question of whether Organigram or anyone else surfaces as a white knight. And it doesn’t address the awkward fact Curaleaf keeps raising: Aurora’s own board sold shares through this very ATM at US$3.57 and US$3.09, prices well below the offer it now calls inadequate.

Aurora kept its ATM. What it still needs is a better answer than “no.”

📺 Trade To Black

Cannabis Stocks, Takeover Fights and Washington Drama | TTB Presented by Flowhub

• Aurora wins at the ASC: the Alberta Securities Commission dismissed Curaleaf’s bid to halt Aurora’s ATM program, which Aurora says it last used August 18. The board still urges shareholders to reject the revised offer by taking no action.

• Institutional capital is creeping back into Canadian cannabis: new money in Village Farms, the Decibel tender, and buybacks at Auxly, SNDL and Cronos, with the group trading at 3.5x to 6x EBITDA. Canopy Growth shareholders also approved a 1-for-5 to 1-for-15 consolidation, elected five directors and named MNP as auditor.

• Michael Bronstein’s Insiders Edge breaks down the DEA judge’s refusal to reopen the rescheduling hearing, with optional briefs due October 29 and November 5 before the stay expires.

• Also on deck: Texas Senate candidate James Talarico’s comments on working with Trump, and the federal indictment of Virginia Sen. Louise Lucas, whose co-owned cannabis business was raided in May. Lucas says she’s being targeted; the charges remain allegations.