With a new draft framework hopefully coming this year, here’s the backstory and latest on the long road to licensing cannabis lounges and other 420-friendly establishments in Massachusetts
As some cannabis industry watchers had hoped, by this time in 2024, weed lounges and perhaps even stoner movie theaters and mini golf courses would have broken ground for construction, if not already started opening for business.
That was wishful thinking and not in any way promised by lawmakers or regulators, but the idea was nonetheless rooted in some reality. After all, Massachusetts started down the path of establishing social consumption regulations all the way back in 2018, when state lawmakers passed a cannabis reform bill that included a provision to allow municipalities to permit weed lounges within their borders in accordance with a particular set of rules.
Since that time, progress in this realm has unfolded like a slow and uneventful rollercoaster ride. The initial aforementioned framework prohibited smoking indoors entirely, required cost-prohibitive ventilation systems, and limited edible sales to only room-temperature products, among other non-starters. Advocates and even former Cannabis Control Commission member Shaleen Title spoke out against those rules in 2022, but the following April, the issue was still basically dead.
More problems stemmed from a “pilot program licensing primary-use social consumption establishments (cannabis cafes) and event host licenses (events open to the public)” that was conceived in 2019. That program put in place a strategy to initially open up “a maximum of twelve municipalities, each of which may implement its own cap on each type of license.” However, commissioners—as well as many Social Equity applicants, who the pilot was intended to uplift—came to feel the effort was misguided. In addition to unreasonable restrictions including a ban on indoor smoking, the group Equitable Opportunities Now (EON) said the pilot also created “significant and unnecessary uncertainty for potential license applicants and potential host communities.”
Commissioners voted to scrap that pilot program in May 2023. In the following months, they held three public listening sessions on the topic across the state, and also sent out a survey targeting potential social consumption applicants (they received 142 responses). Keeping the momentum, last October, Commissioner Nurys Camargo spoke at a CCC meeting about how she and Commissioner Bruce Stebbins led a working group and fact-finding mission that included Camargo and three CCC staff members spending “three packed days in Oakland and San Francisco to better understand what social consumption looks like.”
“Over that time,” Camargo said, “we met with state and local officials and California’s Department of Cannabis Control, we met with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and the chair who oversees San Francisco. We met with the Oakland regulatory commission, as well as licensees, legacy operators, equity applicants, advocates, patients, and other stakeholders.” The commissioner added that she and Stebbins also engaged Colorado in a series of “virtual meetings and exchanges.”
And in the most recent substantial public update by CCC members about social consumption until last week, in January 2024, commissioners Camargo and Stebbins briefed the Massachusetts Cannabis Advisory Board (CAB), which advises the agency on various matters, about their working group’s progress to date. Among their boldest bullet points: prospective applicants and host municipalities should start spitballing plans and possibilities to the extent possible; public education is going to be very important; and this is sure to be extremely complicated, so people should be patient.
More than nine months later, Stebbins and Camargo returned to the CAB with updates last Thursday. The latter said in reintroducing the topic, “Since then, we’ve done a great degree of work, and you’ll see this as we begin to build out what the actual regulations will look like.”
“I’m excited,” Camargo, “to give the public more of the social consumption framework we’ve been working on for a while now.”
Noting their “extensive community outreach to licensees, prospective licenses, public health and safety officials, government agencies, and other jurisdictions,” commissioners outlined the major themes stemming from their research up to this point. Some standouts spanning purview to their primary concerns include:
- “Social Consumption Establishment means an entity license to sell marijuana or marijuana products and allow consumers to consume marijuana or marijuana products solely on its premises.”
- “The license type is currently reserved for Economic Empowerment Participants, Social Equity Participants, Microbusiness, and Cooperative Growers.”
- Priorities will include a public awareness campaign “to message responsible consumption and policy changes,” social consumption responsible vendor training, and municipal advisory to “help communities to understand and adopt social consumption and share best practices.”
- “Communities will need to plan for zoning, local board of public health involvement, and adoption of referendum approach or bylaw/ordinates change.”
For next steps, Stebbins noted they are “reconnecting with appointing authorities [and] key government and stakeholder partners,” sending in a supplemental budget request for an extra half-a-million dollars to fund a public awareness campaign, and outlining a “final draft framework with CCC internal teams.” They hope to give a public presentation before the end of this year, all while continuing ongoing multilateral outreach. “We’ve talked to these groups before,” Stebbins said, “but as we’re finishing up our work we want to revisit their thoughts and make sure that we’re on the same page.”
In the meantime, plenty of promoters and private establishments have done critical groundwork, throwing industry events and parties that present different circumstances where cannabis can be safely incorporated. As Commissioner Stebbins acknowledged in his CAB presentation, unlicensed social consumption is already happening in Massachusetts, and “the only real big difference is that people are bringing their own cannabis products to consume, and are not purchasing them on site, which fits with our regulatory definition.”
All things considered, countless questions remain around what kind of laws are even necessary for certain kinds of consumption. Some outdoor concerts for example already designate weed sections—do we really need new rules to complicate matters?
At this point, that’s largely for commissioners and agency attorneys to determine, and with last week’s latest preview, it seems they’re actually working on it.
