$10 Billion in Sales, $3.83 a Gram: Massachusetts Heads to a Repeal Vote With Its Growers Broke

Andrew Kazakoff grows cannabis in West Boylston, a town of 8,000 northwest of Worcester, in a facility built to turn out more than 5,000 pounds of flower a year. He co-founded Fathom Cannabis in 2018, two years after Massachusetts voters legalized adult use and the year the first two retail stores opened. His problem this year is not demand and it is not yield. It is collections. Half the orders Fathom shipped last year were paid late. A few were never paid at all.

"Do I stay in business when I'm not getting paid by dispensaries?" he asked a Boston Globe reporter in March. "Or how am I going to pay my employees?" His recommendation to the state was not a bailout. It was a tourniquet. "We need to take a halt," he said. "Let the industry settle, work on itself, and come to equilibrium."

On September 5, 2026, the market that has not been paying Kazakoff's invoices crossed $10 billion in cumulative adult-use sales. It took about seven months to travel the last billion. Ten years after the ballot measure and eight years after the first stores opened, Massachusetts cannabis has become a $1.5-billion-a-year industry employing roughly 15,000 people, with retail or delivery access in 300 of the state's 351 municipalities and $2 billion in state and local taxes collected since 2016, including $43 million in local-option revenue in fiscal 2026 alone.

Eight weeks from now, on November 3, the same voters who created it will decide whether to shut it down.

Question 8 would repeal the laws permitting licensed commercial cultivation, manufacturing and retail sale of adult-use cannabis in Massachusetts, along with home cultivation, while leaving the 2012 medical program and limited personal possession intact. No state has ever reversed a functioning legal market at the ballot box. The Cannabis Control Commission's chairman, Chris Harding, has said repeal would take out an industry he calls an integral part of the state economy, with hundreds of businesses behind it. Commissioner Anthony Wilson put the case more plainly: "we've created a market that's creating jobs, that's providing a revenue to the state."

What neither the milestone nor the campaign literature explains is why a market posting record volume is full of operators who cannot make payroll.

The answer is price. A gram of flower that sold for more than $14 in 2018 hit a record-low average of $3.89 in April and was $3.83 by July. On an ounce basis, state figures cited when regulators debated intervening this spring showed retail flower falling from $401.43 in December 2020 to $113.68 last December. Transactions climbed about 8 percent from 2024 to 2025; revenue stayed flat at roughly $1.65 billion. More people bought more product for less money, and the gap came out of growers first.

Supply explains most of it. Licensed canopy in Massachusetts grew from 3.65 million square feet in 2023 to more than 4.5 million by the end of 2025, in a state whose consumer base is not growing at that rate. "If you're not going to limit the amount that's produced, you should expect to see these price declines," said Beau Kilmer, co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center. Derek Ross, chief executive of Nova Farms, which runs six dispensaries across Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine and New Jersey, described where that leaves growers: "Every state has a bottom, and we are in it." Ross has cut his workforce by a quarter in 18 months and estimates Massachusetts retailers have shorted his company about $4.5 million over two years.

The wreckage is documented. Thirty-one licensees were in court-appointed receivership by April, the state's workaround for an industry that cannot file federal bankruptcy; seven of them were cultivators. One hundred twenty-four businesses closed last year. Thirty-seven more surrendered licenses or let them expire. About 667 cannabis businesses remain open, roughly 100 of them equity-owned. Kris Foley, chief executive of Berkshire Roots, which runs two cultivation sites in Pittsfield, is carrying $150,000 to $200,000 in product delivered and unpaid since 2024. Brian Keith, a cofounder of the Newbury Street dispensary Rooted In, owes the IRS $170,000 and describes a storefront that is busy and broke: "We're seeing the same number of people walking through the door, but less revenue."

In April the commission did what Kazakoff asked. Commissioner Kimberly Roy said the quiet part out loud, "We need to hit the brakes," and the board voted a freeze on new cultivation licenses, effective June 16 and set to run 120 days unless extended, with a carve-out for microbusiness applicants from the social equity and economic empowerment programs. The 120th day falls in mid-October, about three weeks before the vote.

The campaign to abolish the market is being paid for almost entirely from out of state. A disclosure filed September 4 shows SAM Action Inc., the Virginia-based political arm of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, put $1.55 million into the Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts in the fourth quarter of 2025 and another $1.63 million so far this year, about $3.18 million in all. Most of it has already been spent on signatures: roughly $1.4 million to collect the 78,301 valid names filed before the December 2025 deadline and another $413,000 for the 12,551 filed by July. What is left is nearly a tie. The repeal committee reported about $980,000 in cash on hand. Stop the Repeal, the industry's opposition campaign, reported about $947,000.

Wendy Wakeman, the coalition's chair and spokeswoman and a longtime Massachusetts Republican strategist, framed the July ballot ruling as a win for the process: "This is a victory not just for our coalition, but for every Massachusetts voter who believes citizens, not political gamesmanship, should decide important public policy questions."

Kevin Sabet, president and chief executive of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, who does not live in Massachusetts, argues the product itself has changed beyond what voters approved in 2016. "The average sort of smokable marijuana now in a dispensary is something like 20% to 30% [potency] when it used to be maybe 20 years ago, about 4% to 5%," he said in August. "The vapes and the concentrates, these dabs and these cartridges," he added, "can be 90% or higher." On who the market has served, he is caustic: "The only people benefiting have been the hedge fund managers and the Wall Street folks."

“Every state has a bottom, and we are in it.”

— Derek Ross, CEO, Nova Farms

That last charge is the one the industry has the hardest time answering, because the numbers give it partial cover. Massachusetts cannabis has produced $2 billion in public revenue and 15,000 jobs, and it has also produced 124 closures in a single year and dozens of growers who are, functionally, extending unsecured credit to their own customers. Both of those are true at $10 billion in sales.

Ryan Dominguez, executive director of the Massachusetts Cannabis Coalition and chair of Stop the Repeal, is running a grassroots campaign because that is what the money allows. Travis Ahern, the commission's executive director, keeps pointing at the top line, an industry that reliably generates more than $1.5 billion a year. Neither argument speaks directly to the receivership docket, and the repeal campaign has not needed it to. Its case is about potency, impaired driving and children, not about whether West Boylston growers get paid.

The polling favors the industry for now. A UMass/WCVB survey of 800 registered voters found repeal losing 55 percent to 33 percent. That is a comfortable margin with a meaningful undecided bloc and eight weeks of paid messaging left, in a state where the question will share a ballot with eight others.

1. Mid-October 2026, the 120-day cultivation license freeze lapses unless commissioners extend it.
2. Mid-to-late October, final pre-election campaign finance disclosures show whether SAM Action tops up the repeal committee for a closing ad buy.
3. November 3, 2026, Question 8, the first statewide vote on repealing a functioning adult-use market in the United States.
4. January 2027, if repeal passes, the wind-down of roughly 667 licensed businesses and the receivership estates already in court.

Kazakoff asked the state to stop issuing grow licenses and the state did, five months before a vote that could cancel every license it has already issued. Fathom's flower is on shelves across Massachusetts, priced at a level that has made the market's tenth billion dollars possible and made his own invoices theoretical.

If Question 8 fails, he is back where he started: a cultivator in an oversupplied state waiting for a freeze to work. If it passes, the retailers who owe him money will have no legal way to sell what they bought, and the $10 billion number announced on September 5 becomes the final one.

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