If passed, the ballot question would end recreational pot sales but would allow medical marijuana to remain legal.
Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts, the organization responsible for the ballot initiative, titled “An Act to Restore A Sensible Marijuana Policy,” was not a party named in the suit. Still Wendy Wakeman, a spokesperson for the group decried the latest action challenging the repeal push.
“I find it surprising that this group is so opposed to asking the voters what they think of legalized marijuana,” said Wakeman.
Last year, the coalition received sole funding, $1.5 million, from Smart Approaches to Marijuana Inc., a national anti-cannabis legalization group, according to public records.
In January, The State Ballot Law Commission, a body overseen by Galvin, ruled against a different challenge to the ballot initiative which levied allegations of that signature-gatherers for the campaign used misleading tactics to get people to sign their petition. The campaign has denied any wrongdoing in that case.
Adam Fine, a partner with Vicente LLP, the Boston cannabis law firm bringing the latest suit, argued in the legal complaint that repealing marijuana laws as written in the petition overreaches into too many parts of state law to be considered in a single question.
“A voter who wishes to repeal adult-use marijuana but retain the Social Equity Program or preserve access to legal services for the medical marijuana industry cannot reasonably cast a vote that reflects those purposes,” the suit said.
The state’s marijuana laws enacted after recreational legalization include frameworks for the state social equity program and the social equity trust fund, which distributed $28.8 million worth of grants to business owners from communities targeted by marijuana policing last month and over $50 million since 2024. These programs would be wiped out by de-legalization, even though social equity status has since been applied to some medical marijuana businesses meant to be unaffected by the question, the suit said.
“The Petition is a classic example of logrolling … it contains multiple provisions that are unrelated to one another,” the lawsuit read, adding it “would impose a hodgepodge of changes to Massachusetts law that are related to one another only by the proponents’ vague and highly subjective assertion that, together, they constitute a ‘sensible marijuana policy.’”
The business owners who are suing are Caroline Pineau, owner of Stem Haverhill, Gyasi Sellers, CEO of Treevit LLC cannabis delivery, and Lisa Mauriello and Boey Bertold, majority owners of Paper 4 Crane Provisions.
Each business has received hundreds of thousands of dollars through the Social Equity Trust Fund, the filing stated.
The lawsuit also claims that Campbell, whose office prepares summaries of ballot initiatives circulated for signature collection and on ballots, failed to properly inform voters of the impacts of passing the question.
It cited more than a dozen factors it said were omitted or not clearly defined in her summary.
Pineau, one of the plaintiffs, also testified at a State House hearing last month where Wakeman was questioned by lawmakers on the merits of the repeal campaign. The ballot measure is currently under legislative review.
“Beyond the astonishing cruelty of eliminating 800 taxpaying businesses and throwing tens of thousands of people out of work in the middle of an affordability crisis, this out-of-state driven initiative fails basic constitutional tests,” Pineau said Wednesday. “It will do nothing except shift total market control to street dealers who don’t check IDs and don’t pay taxes.”
Bryan Hecht can be reached at bryan.hecht@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram @bhechtjournalism.
