‘Dark Money’ Anti-Marijuana Group Is Bankrolling Ballot Measures To Roll Back Legalization In Multiple States, Records Show

Massachusetts marijuana recriminalization ballot: dark money, big signatures, and a fight over the Commonwealth’s cannabis future. That’s the menu special this election season—served hot, greasy, and with an aftertaste of litigation. More than $11 million has already sloshed through committees to shape a record spread of ballot questions, but the headliner is a push to unwind adult-use legalization. One group, SAM Action, has bankrolled every penny of the $1.55 million raised so far to back the measure to recriminalize recreational marijuana. In Maine, the same outfit is the sole donor behind a kindred referendum. Both efforts have drawn accusations of bait-and-switch signature gathering, the political equivalent of promising clam chowder and handing over dishwater. In Massachusetts, the State Ballot Law Commission is weighing objections that canvassers misled signers; in Maine, complaints landed with a shrug and a civics lesson about speech rights. The stakes extend far beyond culture war sloganeering—they reach into the marrow of the cannabis industry, voter trust, and the machinery of modern ballot campaigns.

Who’s bankrolling the rollback

SAM Action is a 501(c)(4), which is Washington shorthand for: trust us, but don’t ask who paid for dinner. The group doesn’t have to reveal donors, even as it funds a drive to shutter adult-use markets Massachusetts voters endorsed back in 2016. SAM Action aligns with Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the advocacy machine co-founded by former Congressman Patrick Kennedy and policy veteran Kevin Sabet, with conservative writer David Frum on the marquee. When asked who’s writing the checks, the campaign demurred. The spokesperson line is tidy, almost soothing—national groups “with health concerns” want “better, safer marijuana laws.” But swap the phrasing and the intent is obvious: move the goalposts, rein in the market, and dare opponents to fight a better-funded ghost. Meanwhile, on the ground, voters in both states describe petition pitches that danced around the word “ban.” Maine’s top election official crystallized the tension with a flinty aside to lawmakers: you can lie, and the First Amendment won’t stop you. It’s a grim reminder that the boundary between persuasion and deception is often drawn with a dry-erase marker.

The stakes in an $8 billion market

Since legalization, Massachusetts has stacked more than $8 billion in adult-use sales, a metric that talks louder than any soundbite about legal cannabis revenue and cannabis taxation. The proposed question would reverse the adult-use framework, leave medical marijuana standing, and expand civil penalties for public possession over an ounce. That’s not a policy tweak; it’s a hard reset. Jobs, municipal host-community deals, and small operators already fighting razor-thin margins would feel the snap first. Consumers would slide back into the gray spaces legalization was designed to clean up. And it’s all unfolding while the national tide sloshes in the other direction: 24 states, two territories, and D.C. allow adult-use marijuana, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a chorus that keeps getting louder even as reform skeptics hum their own tune. The federal posture softened too with a rescheduling move from the White House last year—another step SAM opposed—signaling a national acknowledgment that prohibition-era orthodoxy is losing its last barstool. Massachusetts, long proud of its policy experiments, suddenly finds itself debating whether to unwind one of its most visible ones.

Ballots, signatures, and the price of persuasion

The business of direct democracy isn’t cheap. Most ballot campaigns are spending the better part of a million dollars just to collect signatures; some, much more, depending on whether volunteers or paid circulators do the heavy lifting. In Massachusetts, challengers say some petitioners sold the marijuana rollback as a funding measure for parks or housing, and the State Ballot Law Commission may decide what counts as fraud versus mere salesmanship. Across the border, Maine’s secretary of state has said, with a shrug that could curdle cream:

“You have a right to lie under the First Amendment.”

If the phrase “marijuana policy reform” once meant slow, incremental legalization, the new era is messier—expensive, combative, and defined by national groups test-driving narratives across multiple states at once. For a sense of the broader political ecosystem shaping drug policy, note how reform and restriction both travel: voters in the islands weigh choices like Hawaii Lawmakers File Bills To Put Marijuana Legalization On The Ballot For Voters To Decide; in the Mid-Atlantic, compassion carves narrow lanes with proposals such as Delaware Lawmakers Consider Bill To Allow Medical Marijuana Use In Hospitals By Terminally Ill Patients; activist lawyering keeps pressure on process integrity, as seen when Ohio Cannabis Activists Resubmit Referendum Petition After Attorney General Rejects Initial ‘Misleading’ Version; and the psychedelic frontier doesn’t wait for cannabis to finish arguing with itself, evidenced when New Jersey Governor Signs Bill Creating Psilocybin Therapy Pilot Program And Allocating $6 Million To Psychedelic Treatment Effort. Policy is a relay race now—batons passed across states, ideas mutating mid-stride.

Secrecy, sunlight, and the voter’s tab

Pull back the curtain on this cycle and you’ll see something familiar: well-heeled donors front-loading campaigns so they can clear the signature hurdle, claim legitimacy, and pivot to persuasion when voters are finally paying attention. In Massachusetts, big-ticket donors have already teamed up on rent control, primary reform, and legislative perks. The anti-marijuana push isn’t a lone wolf; it’s part of a crowded field leveraging the same expensive infrastructure. The Senate wants monthly disclosures for ballot financing—a nod to transparency in a system that currently lets the real money story go dark until September. If that measure passes the House, voters might finally see the flows in real time. Until then, the tab for democracy—signature drives, consultants, ads—is paid upfront by people who can afford to gamble. Everyone else settles up at the ballot box.

Here’s the rub: Massachusetts asked voters eight years ago whether to build a legal cannabis market. They answered yes, and the market delivered—tax receipts, jobs, regulated products, the whole grown-up policy package. Now a national, donor-masked campaign wants a do-over. If you care about cannabis industry impact, transparency in ballot-initiative financing, or simply consistent rules of the road, this fight is worth your attention. Whether the question makes the ballot will hinge on rulings about signatures and a broader appetite for reversal. If it does, expect a bruiser—glossy mailers, somber ads, and a trench war over hearts, minds, and fear. Keep your wits, read the fine print, and vote like the outcome lands on your kitchen table—because it will. And if you’re exploring compliant, high-quality options within today’s legal framework, visit our shop: https://thcaorder.com/shop/.