Adult-use cannabis will remain legal in Massachusetts.
Bay Staters sent a clear message to prohibitionists by rejecting Question 8 on Election Day: 76% of voters said “No” to repealing the commonwealth’s cannabis laws governing a regulated and taxed industry, according to unofficial election results from The Associated Press, which called the race with an estimated 48% of votes counted at 11:59 p.m. ET Nov. 3.
Just 24% of voters supported the measure, which sought to end licensed dispensary sales and recriminalize adults 21 and older for growing up to six plants at home for personal use under current laws.
Should this 52-point margin hold, it marks one of the biggest landslide defeats of a citizen-initiated ballot measure in Massachusetts history, with none larger since a 70-point margin in 1976, when voters rejected a question that aimed to establish the Massachusetts Power Authority to create a bulk system to supply wholesale electric power.
Tuesday’s results come 10 years after Massachusetts voters backed the state’s adult-use legalization initiative with a 54% majority in the 2016 election.
Paul Armentano, the deputy director of cannabis advocacy group NORML, said there's no "buyer's remorse" in Massachusetts.
"In fact, more Massachusetts voters support legalization today than did a decade ago, and these election results prove it," he said. "Proponents of this failed effort spent millions of dollars to, in their own words, reset the conversation around cannabis policy. They found out the hard way that the public hasn't changed their minds. Americans favor legalization and regulation over the failed policy of marijuana prohibition."
While 42 states in the U.S. have legalized medical cannabis programs, with 24 states also legalizing adult-use programs, Question 8 marked the first attempt to roll back a licensed marketplace through a citizen-initiated ballot measure.
But legalization proved to be too popular a public policy to reverse in the commonwealth.
The “Stop the Repeal: No on 8” campaign led the coalition that overcame the 2026 prohibitionist proposal. After launching in June, the coalition grew with support from hundreds of elected officials, businesses, advocates, community leaders and voters who stressed the importance of protecting Massachusetts regulated adult-use industry in the months leading up to the election.
“Over the last ten years, legal cannabis has had an immense impact on our state and local economies, becoming a billion-dollar industry,” Stop the Repeal Chairperson Ryan Dominguez said during the campaign.
Question 8, titled “An Act to Restore Sensible Marijuana Policy,” threatened to eliminate nearly 800 licensed businesses and 27,000 industry workers across the commonwealth, including more than 400 dispensaries that have sold more than $10 billion in adult-use cannabis since 2018, providing roughly $2 billion in state and local revenue, according to the state’s Cannabis Control Commission.
The Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts Inc., the political committee behind the 2026 repeal measure, was financially backed by the prohibitionist group Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) Action Inc., which contributed more than $3.7 million to the initiative. Virginia-based SAM Action is a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization whose funding comes from non-tax-deductible donations, meaning the group does not have to disclose its donors.
During the Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts’ signature-gathering drive in October 2025, spokesperson Wendy Wakeman told Cannabis Business Times that the repeal effort began because “there’s a group that coalesces around the idea that we moved too far too fast with marijuana legalization, and that it’s not working well for Massachusetts.”
That group, and those who aligned with it, faced a steep uphill climb in the weeks leading up to the election, when pollsters predicted that as many as 71% of likely voters opposed Question 8, including surveys conducted in September and October by the University of New Hampshire and Suffolk University, respectively.
Those projections came after an early August poll showed just 55% of registered voters planned to oppose Question 8, but that came before support for the Stop the Repeal gained momentum from the likes of Gov. Maura Healey, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, Worcester Mayor Joe Petty, U.S. House Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and 63 state senators and representatives, among others, in opposing the prohibitionist ballot measure.
“I’d vote no,” Healey said last month. “We’ve got to keep recreational marijuana here in Massachusetts. It’s an important industry, the cannabis industry, and I hope the voters keep cannabis.”
Massachusetts was the first state in the eastern half of the country to roll out an adult-use marketplace, but it won’t be the first state to repeal one – at least not any time soon.
Despite a well-funded “scare campaign,” Massachusetts voters chose “common sense” by defeating the ballot initiative, Marijuana Policy Project Executive Director Adam J. Smith said.
“This outcome shows that Massachusetts voters recognize the true value of regulated cannabis markets: reducing youth access, which means significantly fewer kids using cannabis; safer access for adults to rigorously tested and properly labeled products; plummeting arrest rates, which means fewer lives needlessly disrupted and fewer tax dollars wasted; tens of thousands of new jobs, and hundreds of millions in new revenues; and a recognition of personal liberty and freedom of consciousness,” Smith said.
