While Cannabis Control Commission regulators squabble, are contaminant stats stifled? What else aren’t we seeing?
A recent public meeting of the Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) of Massachusetts revealed a lot about internal politics. Under a surface of smiles and laughs, tense currents swirled. The drama related to concerns about the testing of cannabis that have dogged the CCC for years.
The meeting—which I attended with great interest as head of the Institute of Cannabis Science—was focused on what’s known as the Industry Report, which is prepared by the CCC’s Research Department. This report is a data-based overview of the cannabis industry that is submitted to the legislature, and it’s an important part of the state’s oversight of the CCC. The Director of Research, Dr. Julie Johnson, appeared in the virtual meeting to present highlights from the most recent report.
Here, we examine some of the more eyebrow-raising comments from the meeting and connect them with past events to explain why the report arrived when it did, what it contains and what’s missing, and who else was involved.
The late report
“Review and Assessment of the Massachusetts Adult- and Medical-use Cannabis Industries” was published on the CCC research page at 5 p.m. on February 25th, but it was supposed to be turned in much earlier. Reading between the lines throughout the meeting, we find clues as to the causes for the delay. Dr. Johnson’s own exasperation with the process was evident during the question-and-answer period of the meeting: “This report was supposed to be out in December 2023. We’ve had a lot of delays, a lot of questions, concerns.”
Dr. Johnson’s effusive acknowledgements to her team also pointed to the length and difficulty of the process: “There are no other words that sum up the last two-plus years more than ‘thank you.’” Toward the very end of the meeting, Dr. Johnson made a further remark on the work of the Research Department that revealed her feelings of duress: “And so, for the past four, five, no, seven years now, it’s been a while. You know, it’s really been me, me navigating it. But it would be really great to have commission support, to get leadership guidance, to work together, to really have skin in the game from the very beginning.”
For those unfamiliar with Dr. Johnson, it’s worth a moment to describe her scientific career. She was a student of behavioral health and social policy who earned a Ph.D. on substance use and policy from Brandeis University with the support of national fellowships. She won a competitive postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institutes of Health to study at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the number-one public health program in America during her time there. She has been Director of Research since the CCC started seven years ago, and however humble her demeanor, we should regard Dr. Johnson as a formidable scientist.
The previous Industry Report was published on time in February 2020. Overall, the Research Department has produced 13 reports and 22 peer-reviewed scientific articles over seven years. Her career vividly demonstrates that Dr. Johnson never turned in homework so late and–as we’ll see–so incomplete in her whole life. Why did it happen now?
Contents of the 2025 Industry Report
The report presents analyses of selected data from the Massachusetts cannabis market, including sets from the Open Data Catalog, the internal records of agent registrations, and the database of compliance testing data maintained by Metrc. After some background and a summary of methods are six categories of analysis: A. Adult-use Marijuana Establishments, B. Production and Sales, C. Patients, D. Testing, and E. Agents, Access, and Equity.
The first two sections broke down geographic and temporal distributions of sales and production. A major theme of these two sections was the saturation of the market for cannabis in Mass., and the resulting drop in value as a commodity. “The price per gram of adult-use cannabis, calculated as a monthly average, fell from $14.09 in November 2018 to $5.36 in April 2024, a 62% decrease,” reads one slide. The graph (Figure VI.2. in the final report) looks dramatic and provoked discussion. The sales and product distributions charts also compared some data from the Medical vs. Adult Use markets for the first time, and the subsequent “Patients” section gave a further overview of the Medical Marijuana program.
The tensions on display in Tuesday’s meeting appeared to concern primarily the “Testing” and “Agents, Access, and Equity” sections. In the previous Industry Report from 2020, the section “Research Gaps” established goals that included each of these subjects: “Efficacy of laboratory testing for purity, quality, accuracy, and impact of consumer perception of product purity” and “Impact of social equity provisions on the industry and market, including participation;” These statements show that both of these concepts were priorities from the beginning.
The Testing section graphs data for a few compliance test categories from the database maintained by Metrc. “Data were available for the test types ‘THC (%) Raw Plant Material’ (THC), ‘THCA (%) Raw Plant Material’ (THCA), and ‘Total Yeast and Mold (CFU/g) Raw Plant Material’ (TYM) from April 12, 2021, through December 31, 2023.” Dr. Johnson mentioned in her presentation that the reported total THC values have increased over time, while the rate of failure for TYM has decreased.
Notable for their absence from Dr. Johnson’s public presentation were several graphs and tables which, in the full report, break down test results by Independent Testing Lab (ITL). Such breakdowns can be suggestive, because they may show that some labs record systematically higher levels of THC than others, or fail fewer samples.
The report’s Figure VIII.4 gives a box-and-whisker plot that shows that a few labs’ reported THCA values averaged 5 percent higher than the average over all labs for the time frame concerned. Table VIII.9 shows that one lab managed to record only four TYM failures out of 1,571 tests during the time frame concerned–a 0.3 percent rate of failure. It’s hard to understand why these results from the full 2025 Industry Report were left out of the slides shown at the February 25 public meeting.
The section “Agents, Access, and Equity” contained some analyses of agent registrations broken down by gender and race. The results didn’t offer an inspiring view of success at achieving social equity in Mass.; participation in the industry is overwhelmingly white and male, with 77 percent senior agent registrations held by Whites, and only 5 percent by Blacks. Only 25 percent of senior registrations are held by women. Note that these percentages concern registrations, not individual people. We’ll get to that in the next section.
The report’s sections “D. Testing” and “E. Agents, Access, and Equity” appear to contain results that call into question the CCC’s success at managing the ITLs and at promoting social equity and inclusion.
What else is missing from the 2025 industry report?
One of the most obvious limitations of this year’s industry report is that it is filed in 2025, but the “D. Testing” and “E. Agents, Access, and Equity” sections contain no data at all from 2024. “Table III.1. Data Sources and Timeframes” reveals that data from both of these sections were obtained by internal requests to the Data Department.
A sentence from section E is especially revealing: “The Commission’s Research Department extracted all regulated cannabis market agent data, including all demographic information, from registration forms submitted to the agency prior to employment at Massachusetts cannabis facilities (N = 20,753) as of June 30, 2023.” It suggests that the request for data about registered agents was fulfilled in time to meet the report’s initial deadline of December 2023. As the report got delayed, the authors never received fresh data.
That lack of updates to the registered agent data during nearly two years while this report was delayed is especially significant because those data only extend through June 2023, and they also don’t count actual people. From Dr. Johnson’s presentation: “I want to note that the unit of analysis here is agent registrations, which is somewhat higher than the number of people currently employed as agents in the industry.” As Chris Faraone has written previously, the CCC is unable to provide reliable counts of the number of people registered as employees of the cannabis industry. The Data Department has not updated these demographic data to provide necessary clarification.
Section “D. Testing” contains testing data from April 12, 2021, to December 31, 2023, so it uses no data that aren’t currently available to the public. In fact, many of these reported results are presented in an interactive format on a Medicinal Genomics website that permits the casual user to dissect them. The breakdowns on the website are far more granular than those within this Industry Report, they extend through mid-2024, and the website compares data from other states.
The 2025 Industry Report also lacks analyses of tests for heavy metals or for pesticides. The report states that “Data were not available for analysis for this test type as of April 2024,” which tidily explains why these tests are omitted, and also indicates that the request for testing data in the report was fulfilled in April 2024. The testing data stop in December 2023 for this reason.
It is noteworthy that sections of this Industry Report which are most likely to provoke further oversight from the legislature, “D. Testing” and “E. Agents, Access, and Equity,” are the two sections with the shortest and least complete datasets, and they are the sections for which the Research Department needed to request data from the Data Department.
The MCR Labs complaint and “hypothesis testing”
On Dec 30th, 2024 a legal complaint came to light which featured MCR Labs as the plaintiff and eight other ITLs as defendants. That complaint drew on data for THC, THCA, and TYM through the second quarter of 2024. It’s interesting that the MCR Labs lawsuit uses testing data more recent than those available on the CCC website or analyzed in the 2025 Industry Report.
The complaint by MCR Labs presents several types of analysis, one of which is a “hypothesis test.” For example, article 97 of the complaint presents a histogram chart with TYM results reported by Green Analytics in which concentrations in CFU/g are on the x-axis and number of test results are the heights of the bars. The “hypothesis” is that the bars on either side of the dashed vertical line which depicts the action limit of the test should not be too different in height, unless the testing lab is considering the action limit when reporting the results. The conclusion of the complaint is that there is a “cliff” at the action limit, with many test results just below failing and very few above, allegedly signifying fraud.
Dr. Johnson knows how to do this analysis, and knows it matters. During her February 25 presentation, she noted that “the analyses for this report do not include any inferential statistics, hypothesis testing, or modeling. . . . Those involving inferential statistics or tests for specific hypotheses are critically important and might be addressed in future work.” She was even quoted in article 16 of the legal complaint, itself quoting a Worcester Business Journal article, discussing such analyses: “Data from some labs showed a massive number of samples fell just below the state’s threshold for contaminants like mold… while virtually none were above the threshold.”
Among the steps Dr. Johnson recommended: “Enhance and improve industry monitoring of seed-to-sale testing data to monitor any abnormalities in the data. And this is really important to do proactively [her emphasis].”
By her own words, Dr. Johnson knows that hypothesis testing like that utilized in the lawsuit by MCR Labs is relevant to evaluating the effectiveness of contaminant testing. She did not attempt to justify the absence of such analyses from the 2025 Industry Report, although she mentioned their omission several times during her presentation.
Why does Dr. Johnson keep invoking the statute?
Dr. Johnson’s presentation and the Industry Report made prominent mention of M.G.L. Title XV Chapter 94G Section 17, the section of Mass law that establishes the Research Department within the CCC. The Research Department website contains a link near its top to the full text of the law, and Dr. Johnson included it in her post on LinkedIn that advertised her presentation. The law stipulates, in part, that the Research Department will report annually to the legislature.
Her comments in the meeting suggested Dr. Johnson’s concern about whether her department truly has the freedom it needs to report their empirical analyses to the legislature. She emphasized that her Research Department is “…an independent function, an independent body within the Commission, and we serve as an objective sounding block.” At another point she said she wanted “to make sure that everyone at the Commission, especially the commissioners, are comfortable and understand what’s in the report and, you know, what research is, is an objective research, you know, is an independent process.”
Most interestingly, when Dr. Johnson discussed her “considerations” (meaning recommendations) near the end of her presentation, she included “six additional considerations focused specifically on testing. These additional considerations are pursuant to Mass General Law 94 G, section 17 A.” Here, Dr. Johnson appeared to cite the law to justify recommendations on testing, as though someone might have previously told her they were outside her purview.
It’s probable that Dr. Johnson reflexively cites the law which empowers her reporting because she’s recently argued with a lawyer about it. In particular, she seems to be stressing that the law gives her department the power to analyze data from contaminant testing and to independently report to the legislature.
A canceled conference presentation
Dr. Johnson made several other comments that signaled her concerns during the public meeting. When answering a question about presenting at conferences, she said, “But we do hope to plan to continue, to–you know, I am associate editor of Research Society on Marijuana–to present this, at Cannabis. We weren’t able to do it last summer, because of some concerns.” With a little digging, we were able to figure out what she was talking about.
Dr. Johnson is an associate editor for Cannabis, the flagship journal for the Research Society on Marijuana. The “Abstracts from the 2024 Scientific Meeting of the Research Society on Marijuana, July 19th-21st, 2024” contains an abstract for “Guiding Cannabis Researchers and Regulators Through Complex Industry Testing Standards and Data,” led by Dr. Julie K. Johnson. Page 223 contains the sentence, “The overall TYM fail rate was 8.48%, ranging by ITL from 0.00% to 14.85%,” showing that lab-by-lab breakdowns were part of that (cancelled) presentation. Because the abstract appears in the published book, we know that the presentation must have been canceled just before the conference, which began on July 19th, and Dr. Johnson only mentioned “some concerns” as explanation.
On July 9, 2024, Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro testified before a Joint Committee of the state legislature, arguing that the CCC had failed and should be put under a receivership. A particular subject of the IG’s criticism was the enforcement of testing, but most memorable may have been when he excoriated the CCC over the concealed death of Lorna McMurray, saying, “But I did think it was worth bringing to your attention as an example, the tragic death of an employee in the industry. Like you, you know, you can draw your conclusion, but I can’t, I can’t totally understand, like, how that wouldn’t be known.”
It’s not possible for us to say for certain whether the IG’s testimony was connected with the last-minute cancellation of Dr. Johnson’s presentation, but this cancellation stifled evidence of problems in contaminant testing of Mass. weed just after the IG impugned the CCC’s oversight.
A leave of absence as the 2025 Industry Report was being completed
As she prepared the 2025 Industry Report, Dr. Johnson consulted with us here at the Institute of Cannabis Science, and we suggested testing-specific recommendations, which were incorporated into the report and presented on one of the final slides on February 25.
When she met with us on September 6th, 2024, she expressed relief at speaking from outside of her office, because some people within the CCC might be angry that she sought our advice. On September 17th, 2024, Dr. Johnson took a leave of absence, citing “job-related post-traumatic stress.”
Tension between Commissioner Camargo and Dr. Johnson
Early in the meeting, Acting Chair Bruce Stebbins made an unusual request: “Just as a reminder, obviously, at the conclusion of this report, we’re more than happy to invite general commissioner comments following the presentation, but, I’ve been asked that, you know, any kind of detailed questions that you might have that might involve further work of the research team, we invite those to be emailed to our Research Department.” His phrasing suggests that this request comes from the Research Department.
In her opening remarks, Commissioner Nurys Camargo said, “But also I just want to, I just want to remind Dr. Johnson, because we’ve had this conversation. But, you know, we ask a lot of questions and we ask questions on the spot.” This sounds like the continuation of an argument.
Commissioner Camargo also appeared to expect an opportunity to edit the Industry Report again before it reaches the legislature, saying, “Thank you, Doctor Johnson, to you and to your team. And just looking forward to kind of, you know, finishing this up so that, you know, we can send it to the state legislators and, they can see all the work that we’ve done.”
Dr. Johnson was clearly confused by Commissioner Camargo’s comment, saying, “I have a clarifying question because the report is finalized and it should be going to the legislature as is. So we can definitely talk offline. Okay. Because I would be very confused by that.”
The commissioner didn’t relent, saying, “I was under the impression that we were going to have the conversation today, send you some questions, and if there was any, like, you know, any changes or comments or whatever, then we would do them.” Clearly dissembling about what sort of edits might be required, the commissioner said, “if we’re going to send in the PowerPoint as well, you know, should we number the PowerPoint?”
This suggestion seemed to push Dr. Johnson over the edge, and she dropped the mask for a moment, saying “Yeah, this report was supposed to be out in December 2023. We’ve had a lot of delays, a lot of questions, concerns. Happy to answer anything. But this report is now two years overdue and it should go to the legislature… This report, from my professional opinion and from my ethics as a researcher, is complete.”
Finally, the Acting Chair stepped in to clarify, “the report is final.”
These exchanges suggest that Commissioner Camargo has involved herself in this Industry Report to the legislature in a way that has aroused Dr. Johnson’s sense of scientific ethics. They point to possible conflicts that may have occurred in the past, and reveal the Commissioner’s anxiety to influence the text of the final report.
Commissioner Camargo’s influence over the report
In retrospect, Commissioner Camargo’s concern over the contents of the 2025 Industry Report could be discerned from the beginning of the meeting. In her opening remarks, she said, “This is a Commission report, right? It’s led by the research team. But at the end of the day, this is a Commission report, that goes up to our legislators, so that they can see and understand what’s happening throughout the industry.”
Before Johnson spoke, Camargo signaled that she had a previous hand in editing the report’s contents, saying “I’ve read this report a few times now before the edits and now after the edits.” From her remarks after the presentation, we can infer that Commissioner Camargo had also engaged the Legal Department in reviewing the report: “I also want to thank the legal team, as well, for working with you collaboratively and looking through this report. Again, it’s coming from the Commission.”
Even after the report was declared “final” by Acting Chair Stebbins, Commissioner Camargo wasn’t finished attempting to involve herself in presenting its conclusions to the legislature, saying, “for [Director of Government Affairs and Policy] Matt Giancola , I would just say that I’m curious. What, if anything, will we be presenting on this at our State of Cannabis [report] at the State House?”
These comments from Commissioner Camargo further reveal her concerns regarding the reception of this report by the legislature and hint that she has already involved the General Counsel’s Office in an edit of the report. We are left to wonder what was removed by the editing, and if it connects with the glaring omissions we mentioned earlier.
The protective commissioner
While Commissioner Stebbins was mostly silent except to referee, and Commissioner Camargo appeared to seek control of the report, Commissioner Kimberly Roy effused praise for Dr. Johnson. In her first comment after the presentation, Commissioner Roy insisted that she would follow up right away with questions about testing, especially for TYM. Later in the meeting, Commissioner Roy asked two different times about Dr. Johnson’s opportunities to present externally; one might suppose that she was attempting to draw the director out regarding her cancelled conference presentation.
The connection between the two was especially evident from one of Dr. Johnson’s later responses to the commissioner, saying, “And I have to send accolades right back to you, Commissioner Roy, because I feel like you’re in a really, you know, we’re in a really tough situation. We’re trying to find how to do this.”
It’s noteworthy that Roy was the sole commissioner acknowledged by Dr. Johnson for support. It appears that the two find themselves in the same boat as regards the accuracy of contaminant testing.
Legal department involvement
The limitations of time frame and categories of contaminants that were investigated in section D. Testing of the Industry Report appear rooted in the fulfillment of requests by the Data Department.
We at the Institute of Cannabis Science have had similarly frustrating experiences with data requests at the CCC, which are overseen by members of the General Counsel’s Office. In our June 4th, 2023, letter about a May 2023 request for data, we complained to the legislature about a response from Andrew Carter, at the time an Associate General Counsel, which said in part, “Please be advised the public records law does not require the creation of a new record.” This looked like a deliberate overstatement of the limitations of public records law, which anticipates that new documents, such as Mr. Carter’s email, will always be generated by requests. Since then, Mr. Carter has been promoted to Chief of Staff.
In response to the Institute’s most recent request “for all of the Metrc cannabis testing datasets that the Commission has shared through public record requests,” Associate General Counsel Michael Bergquist wrote, “‘all records’ or ‘all of a category of records’ are not descriptive enough to allow non-lawyer personnel to determine which records may be responsive.” This response is absurd because it’s often impossible to specify in advance the precise number of records which will be responsive, and our request demanded no judgement, only sending us what had been sent before.
We don’t know whether to blame the General Counsel’s Office or the Data Department for poor fulfillment of requests for this report, but we do know that someone from the GC’s Office was involved in editing this report. It would be fascinating to know who, and what they edited.
What motives are there to conceal analyses of testing and equity?
The oversight of ITLs by the CCC has been criticized for years, and is now the subject of a lawsuit by MCR Labs. The CCC has never closed a lab for misconduct in seven years of Adult Use, and Dr. Johnson appears to be a witness who could be called should the suit ever go to trial. The February 25 meeting gave us overwhelming evidence that Dr. Johnson has received significant internal pushback for attempting to research compliance testing.
From this Industry Report, the Commission’s progress on equity appears to have serious shortfalls, and they haven’t successfully collected and managed the data they will need to demonstrate to the legislature the effectiveness of their Social Equity Program. It’s likely that these facts place special pressure on Commissioner Camargo, who reminded us several times in the public meeting that Equity is her focus.
After all the drama surrounding the rollout of this Industry Report, its impressive delays and omissions, we hope to see the Inspector General step in and investigate.
