Massachusetts officials have rejected a challenge to a ballot initiative that seeks to significantly roll back the state’s marijuana legalization law by repealing regulated sales.
Weeks after cannabis activists filed a complaint with the State Ballot Law Commission under the Secretary of State’s office—alleging that petitioners with the anti-cannabis campaign used misleading tactics to convince voters to support its ballot placement—the body on Thursday overruled the objection.
The commission said advocates who challenged the ballot measure raised “unsupported allegations” about the propriety of the signature gathering process that they said warranted official scrutiny.
The claim “rings hollow given that absolutely no admissible evidence has been presented or offered supporting the allegations made,” the commission’s ruling said.
“With this decision, the certification of this round of petitions has now formally ended, and all eleven initiatives are now before the Legislature,” Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin (D), who chairs the commission, said, referring collectively to all ballot petitions advancing in the state this year including on other unrelated issues. “If the Legislature chooses not to pass any of the initiatives, the petitioners will have the opportunity to begin the final round of signature gathering in May.”
This represents a setback for advocates and industry stakeholders who have flagged numerous accounts of alleged misconduct by petitioners working on behalf of the Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts.
It also comes as new polling shows nearly half of those who signed the marijuana sales repeal petition feel misled, with many claiming that the measure was pitched to them as a proposal to address unrelated issues such as public education and expanded housing.
For what it’s worth, the anti-marijuana coalition has denied any wrongdoing in the signature collection process and waved off the survey results.
The state last month certified 78,301 signatures for the petition, titled “An Act to Restore a Sensible Marijuana Policy.”
The initiative would still let adults 21 and older possess and gift up to an ounce of cannabis, but it would repeal provisions of the voter-approved legalization law allowing for commercial sales and home cultivation by adults. The medical cannabis program would remain intact under the measure.
An association of state marijuana businesses had separately urged voters to report to local officials if they observe any instances of “fraudulent message” or other deceitful petitioning tactics.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s (D) office—which cleared the campaign for signature gathering in September—has stressed to voters the importance of reading their summary, which is required to go at the top of the signature form, before signing any petitions.
The Massachusetts legislature received the initiative for consideration earlier this month when the 2026 session kicked off. Now that the state election commission has issued its ruling on the complaint, lawmakers have until May 5 to act on the proposal. If they choose not to enact it legislatively, the campaign would need to go through another round of petitioning and get at least 12,429 certified signatures by July 1 to make the November ballot.
Meanwhile, the head of Massachusetts’s marijuana regulatory agency recently suggested that the measure to effectively recriminalize recreational cannabis sales could imperil tax revenue that’s being used to support substance misuse treatment efforts and other public programs.
To that point, Massachusetts reached a marijuana sales milestone in 2025—with $1.65 billion in adult-use sales for the year, bringing the state’s total legal cannabis purchases to over $10 billion since the recreational market launched.
Whether the cannabis measures make the cut is yet to be seen. Voters approved legalization at the ballot in 2016, with sales launching two years later. And the past decade has seen the market evolve and expand. As of August, Massachusetts officials reported more than $8 billion in adult-use marijuana sales.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts lawmakers recently assembled a bicameral conference committee to reach a deal on a bill that would double the legal marijuana possession limit for adults and revise the regulatory framework for the state’s adult-use cannabis market.
Last month, state regulators also finalized rules for marijuana social consumption loungues.
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The state Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) recently launched an online platform aimed at helping people find jobs, workplace training and networking opportunities in the state’s legal cannabis industry.
State lawmakers have also been considering setting tighter restrictions on intoxicating hemp-derived products and a plan to allow individual entities to control a larger number of cannabis establishments.
Also in Massachusetts, legislators who were working on a state budget butted heads with CCC officials, who’ve said they can’t make critical technology improvements without more money from the legislature.
Massachusetts lawmakers additionally approved a bill to establish a pilot program for the regulated therapeutic use of psychedelics. And two committees have separately held hearings to discuss additional psilocybin-related measures.
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