Saying goodbye to Mary Jane?

Marijuana stinks—literally, morally, and societally. For decades, our supposedly enlightened political leaders worked to convince us otherwise. From the 1970s on, states such as Oregon, Colorado, and California led the charge in decriminalizing the psychoactive drug. Since Jimmy Carter in 1977, every single Democratic president has taken issue with our nation’s restrictions on marijuana. With the advent of the Barstool conservatives, even the Republican Party has been no safe haven from this wave of reefer madness. In 2024, Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy nearly overturned marijuana laws in Ron DeSantis’ red state stronghold of Florida (clearing 56% of the popular vote, but not the 60% threshold required to succeed). It is all the more remarkable, then, that pot permissiveness may finally be coming to an end in the most unlikely of places: the blue bastion of Massachusetts.

Despite the occasional “moderate” Republican governor, Massachusetts is one of the most solidly Democratic states in the country. According to the latest Cook numbers, a Republican has a better chance winning statewide election in California, New York, and Hawaii than Massachusetts in 2026. It’s no surprise, then, that Massachusetts voted to legalize medical marijuana in 2012 and recreational uses in 2016. Far more thrilling and strange is that, a decade later, Elizabeth Warren’s Massachusetts may vote to re-stigmatize recreational pot usage, with civil penalties for possession of more than one ounce (the equivalent of more than $100).

The Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts, which is poised to put an anti-marijuana provision on ballots in 2026, could not sound more different than Portnoy’s coalition of Floridians for libertine adult pleasure. The Massachusetts coalition, made up of parents, teachers, and health professionals, is concerned about marijuana’s effects on children. According to their spokeswoman Wendy Wakeman, the group “coalesces around the idea that we moved too far too fast with marijuana legalization and that it’s not working well for Massachusetts.”

The group’s concerns are well founded. As the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman has argued, marijuana is addictive (“about 30 percent of users” developing cannabis use disorder), linked to health problems (“heart attack, stroke, lung damage, psychosis, and schizophrenia”), and has resulted in 1,400 additional car-crash deaths per year. Legalization, far from helping, makes matters worse, as a comparative analysis has found that legalization boosted marijuana usage by 25% for adults and 10% for adolescents. According to Massachusetts’ own 2019 study, one-quarter of its kids from 16-20 use marijuana every month, and 13% use it almost daily. This isn’t fearmongering; it’s a well-documented public health crisis.

But there are perverse incentives when it comes to addressing this drug problem: namely, government and business bottom lines. Since recreational marijuana was legalized in 2016, the psychoactive drug has boosted Massachusetts’ state economy by more than $8 billion and resulted in nearly $2 billion of state and local tax revenue. With marijuana business booming in Massachusetts, there is a natural pipeline and market for pro-marijuana campaign financing, but not the anti-marijuana effort.

Fortunately, the tide appears to be turning, even if the odds remain heavily in favor of marijuana’s lucrative lobby. According to polling from Gallup, 2023 was the high watermark for support for legal weed, with 87% of Democrats and 55% of Republicans endorsing legalization. Since then, the country has cooled somewhat on cannabis, with Republican support plummeting to 40% in 2025, and even Democrats experiencing a slight downtick. In 2026, even slight shifts could make a significant difference, as the ballot measure must receive the Democratic-controlled state legislature’s approval or else find an additional 12,429 signatures by the summer.

With the state coalition’s focus squarely on children’s health, we might not exactly be witnessing the glorious rebirth of Puritan Massachusetts, but the commonwealth and the country will still be the better off if they succeed.