The Cannabis Control Commission doesn’t know the extent of any rule-breaking going on, but members are finally aiming to hold bad actors responsible
At last week’s meeting of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission, members discussed establishing a functional secret shopper program to test label accuracy, as well as potentially forging a process for permanently barring bad actors from the state industry.
Amid ongoing problems with Independent Testing Labs such as complaints of artificial potency inflation, the CCC is now considering a way to implement a secret shopper program that it was supposed to have already been running for years.
“Several years ago I literally raised the question about whether or not we have a secret shopper program,” Commission Chair Shannon O’Brien said at last week’s public meeting. “It was implied by staff that we do and we don’t.”
O’Brien clarified that there is technically a process by which the CCC can obtain a product and have it tested. The agency has also considered building its own testing lab for such purposes, but budget woes have kept that idea from advancing.
“We have an intermittent process whereby we can do confirmatory testing, but it is a problem that we do not have an independent standard testing lab, it makes it somewhat difficult for us,” O’Brien added.
O’Brien was recently suspended and then fired from her post before returning to the body after an exonerating court order. During her absence from the CCC, Commissioner Kimberly Roy said that she became especially interested in improving how the agency ensures accurate labeling and test results.
“We’ve all had a different understanding of what was occurring [with the] secret shopper [program],” Roy said. “We need to make this a real, robust reality. We get leads, we get tips. … What we want to do is take it to the next level. We’re looking at creative ideas and solutions.”
Beyond inflated THC potency and fudging mold counts, the CCC is also concerned about the possibility that licensed operators could be working in or at least enabling the illicit market. New York’s Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) announced on Oct. 20 that it filed charges against cannabis processor Omnium Health for an alleged “reverse licensing” scheme, involving collecting rent from non-licensed operators in exchange for allowing them to make use of a licensed facility to create products for the illegal market.
As part of OCM’s charges, the agency is seeking to permanently bar Omnium Health from operating in the legal market, aka debarment. All things considered, O’Brien said that she has also anecdotally heard that Massachusetts may also have a problem with inversion, which is an illicit product entering the legal market, as well as diversion, which is a legal product going underground.
“Commissioner Roy and I are going to be doing a meeting within the next week or two looking at the issue of inversion, trying to understand the scale,” O’Brien said. “Is it a problem? Is it something that we need to be addressing more quickly?”
The chair added that she is having ongoing discussions with CCC legal counsel to see if the agency should adopt its own version of debarment in the event that investigators uncover illegal activity. Still, she noted that when comparing the possibility of malfeasance, it is worth considering that Massachusetts has a stronger system than New York in place to track products.
“It’s my understanding that New York does not have as robust seed to sale tracking as Massachusetts, but they do have greater enforcement actions related to unlicensed activities,” O’Brien said.
New York originally signed a contract with BioTrack for seed-to-sale services, with operators being required to start using the system by Aug. 1, 2025—two-and-a-half years after the adult-use market launch. That deadline was postponed until Oct. 1, but was later completely abandoned when the state switched its contract from BioTrack to Metrc shortly after both companies announced a strategic partnership with a possible merger down the line.
In any case, O’Brien said she wants to look into both the extent of illegal activity in the commonwealth and how the CCC can best thwart the subterfuge.
“We don’t know whether it’s real, but we’ve heard rumors that this could be a little bit more widespread than we think in Massachusetts and so we just want to get ahead of it and we want to figure out ways to address it,” she said.
