CCC Chair O’Brien: ‘If we continue to hide data from the public, we can’t do our job to protect public health and safety‘
When the Cannabis Control Commission submitted its mandatory Review and Assessment of the Massachusetts Adult and Medical Use Cannabis Industries in February this year, it was obvious that something was a little off. As we noted at the time, in addition to being more than a year overdue—the agency was supposed to file the compliance with state lawmakers in December 2023—it appeared to be missing important information, specifically around lab testing.
Apparently we’re not the only ones who noticed. At today’s public CCC meeting, Chair Shannon O’Brien introduced an agenda item to discuss and vote on a motion relating to “Omitted Data from [the] 2025 Industry Report Regarding Public Health and Safety.” “This is one of the really important transparency issues that I’d like to raise,” she said. “It’s my understanding that our research team had … been looking to get internal data about information that was collected from different Independent Testing Labs and that there was a decision made by the legal team to remove certain language from the report that we sent to the legislature.”
O’Brien said a former CCC attorney “stated that the reason that information was removed is because [the CCC was] concerned about lawsuits going on between individual Independent Testing Lab licensees.” That concerns the chair, she added, because “if we continue to hide data from the public, we can’t do our job to protect public health and safety.”
“I understand the concern that the general counsel might have about the potential for the commission to be called in as a witness or to provide testimony in a lawsuit, and I appreciate the diligence with which the general counsel has worked on that,” O’Brien said. “The thing is that I feel that if we are in essence weighing in at all in a lawsuit between licensees, and in essence hiding that information, that is siding with one potential party to that lawsuit over another.
“We have to be agnostic when weighing in on any lawsuit … especially because it is clear that data that our research team was ultimately able to get actually highlighted the fact that there are significant problems and potential opportunities for lab shopping that have occurred here.”
In “trying to understand what we do as a body to protect health and safety if our legal team is overriding our ability to protect public health and safety by hiding data,” O’Brien initiated a motion to “direct the [CCC] executive director and Commissioner [Kimberly] Roy to work with the research team, the data team, and other necessary parties to review initial iterations of the 2025 industry report and provide a comparative analysis with the final version as approved by the commission.”
CCC attorney responds
In response to the charges leveled by O’Brien, the CCC general counsel said: “I want to make it very clear, without getting into the specifics of any legal advice that was given to the commission, that the legal division neither changed any data, omitted any data, or recommended any kind of actions with respect to data and its review.”
That’s about as much as they were willing to disclose though. The agency attorney added: “To the extent that the legal department did review the report, our review is subject to the attorney-client privilege. That privilege belongs to the board and the board would have to take action to waive that privilege.”
The answer didn’t satisfy O’Brien: “I question the [unilateral] authority of the general counsel to scrub data that would be important for the public to know.” The general counsel repeated the claim that the “legal department never scrubbed data” or did anything of the sort, so O’Brien asked about the nature of any edits to the report. The lawyer said that those changes are privileged, but Commissioner Roy brought props for show and tell that offered insights regarding the tweaks.
Receipts and an amended motion
Offering some clarity around the subject of the report in question, Roy produced notes from a February 2025 meeting with an agency attorney and a member of the CCC’s research team. She explained that the information was not marked as privileged, and proceeded to read into the record an account of matters in which the CCC lawyer told her: “We should steer clear of suggesting that testing may be lacking because the commission may be faced with a lot of subpoenas and lawsuits so the extent that we can get our point across without that wording is a benefit to us.”
Roy then suggested that commissioners “lift” the privilege currently concealing any edits to the submitted report, “because this is suppression of important public safety … public health data that the legislature has the right to have access to, that the public has the right to have access to, that patients have the right to have access to.”
The commissioner continued: “It is my understanding that there was an initial iteration of this report with economic incentive considerations, and why people do data manipulation.” Noting that Executive Director Travis Ahern is trying to locate the first version of the Review and Assessment of the Massachusetts Adult and Medical Use Cannabis Industries, Roy added: “It is our job to safeguard public health. Some of these problems are not unique to Massachusetts—lab shopping, data manipulation. But it is incumbent upon us to address them within our jurisdiction and to be able to talk about them publicly.
“I am appreciative of this conversation in public, and maybe we can have a discussion and resubmit the report with an addendum to the legislature.”
O’Brien then added a clause to her aforementioned motion, which would have the research team and other involved agency offices report back to members no later than Dec. 11, 2025. The amended motion includes “any waiver of legal privilege to allow commissioners full access to discuss these issues in a public meeting.” It passed unanimously, with new Commissioner Carrie Benedon abstaining due to a lack of familiarity with the background of the subject.
Despite Benedon not voting on the matter, O’Brien asked her colleague, whose first day on the job was Tuesday, to assist Commissioner Roy in fulfilling the motion and looking into the edits at issue. The new member obliged.
We told you so
In addition to our general initial response to the February industry report, in which we mocked the glaring omission of relevant lab testing data, Talking Joints Memo published a deep analysis of the situation, its players, and the public record surrounding the matter written by Jeff Rawson of the Institute of Cannabis Science in March. It is extensive and damning, and we heard from several CCC employees that it caused outrage at the agency. At today’s meeting, it became apparent why some parties may have been concerned.
The good news is that those at the agency tasked with figuring out what went wrong have a road map. We encourage all Mass cannabis industry stakeholders to read the whole thing, but in the troubling alarm he rang several months ago Rawson noted: “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.”
He continued: “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.”
