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Pot smokers and budding weed entrepreneurs are clearly still high as a kite over their big victory last November when voters passed a statewide referendum legalizing marijuana.
That euphoria was on display last week as cannabis enthusiasts flocked to the local Elks Hall in Natick for an “Independence Gala,” which featured new gizmos like a “vaporization system” and lessons on how to make “candy” of the sort you definitely don’t want to give to the kids.
Heck, there’s even a Northeastern Institute of Cannabis in Natick, complete with its own dean and faculty, set up to train students who hope to work in what is being billed as a growing industry in more ways than one.
But if weed activists truly think they will be soon strolling down to their corner suburban pot shop to stock up on their favorite strain for the weekend or grab a few pot brownies for dessert, they surely are smoking some strong stuff.
Scott Van Voorhis
We don’t live in Colorado; we live in Massachusetts, where “NIMBY” should be on our state seal. And if pot supporters and would-be marijuana moguls were to step out of their happy haze for a minute and take a look around, they’d see that themselves.
You need look no further than the protracted, years-long effort for casino developers to make good on the promise of the state’s 2011 gambling law to see what’s ahead for the so-called marijuana industry.
Going on six years since that casino bill passed, so far all the gambling industry has to show for it a relatively small slot parlor in sleepy Plainville down on the Rhode Island border.
Two much larger resort casinos will be opening in Springfield and Everett 2018 and 2019, respectively, but in the case of the $2.4 billion Wynn Boston Harbor, only after years of nasty legal and regulatory spats, including knock-down, drag-out fights with mayors in Boston and Somerville.
Even so, Steve Wynn was lucky to have found a site and a willing host city in post-industrial Everett, with the Las Vegas tycoon and other casino developers all but run out of the suburbs when they popped up with proposals for gambling resorts.
Wynn initially teamed up with Patriots owner Bob Kraft with plans to build a casino across from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, but that proposal imploded in humiliating fashion amid a backlash by residents. The proposal never even made it to a town-wide vote.
Other would-be casino developers were given the bums rush by Milford, Chelmsford and Palmer, among other towns.
Toothless Commission
Pot supporters, especially those with dollar symbols in their eyes, will surely object, correctly noting that the Massachusetts casino law passed by the Legislature back in 2011 and the marijuana referendum that passed last fall are two very different animals.
The Legislature put in all sorts of local controls in the 2011 law to prevent casinos from being able to open in suburbs and cities that did not want them. In order to build a casino, a developer first had to cut a mitigation agreement with a town or city’s elected officials, pass a community referendum and possibly win a two-thirds vote at town meeting for new, gambling-friendly zoning rules. There were more than enough levers to pull to enable any determined group of opponents to effectively block a proposal.
By contrast, the pot referendum that passed last fall was written by the cannabis industry. Instead of forcing a developer to pass two or three major votes, local opponents of pot shops must convince their town to opt out through a town-wide vote. They must opt out, rather than in, which is a significant difference.
But whatever advantage the budding marijuana industry may have gained with this too-clever-by-half wording, it is fading fast as the NIMBY instincts of communities across the state, and especially in the affluent suburbs of Greater Boston, start to kick into overdrive.
Westborough residents recently voted to ban all recreational pot businesses, while five other towns have passed temporary moratoriums, the Boston Globe recently reported, citing the Massachusetts Municipal Association. Another 74 will soon vote on either moratoriums or outright bans.
And on the state level, the outlook for recreational pot is even hazier.
In the months after the Legislature passed gambling legislation back in 2011, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission was launched to oversee and regulate the industry. By contrast, while the marijuana referendum that passed last fall calls for a Cannabis Control Commission, it remains a powerless paper entity, with no agreement in the Legislature over what such a commission should do or look like.
Meanwhile, the starting date for retail pot shops has been pushed deeper into 2018, with some lawmakers, citing the opioid epidemic, even pushing to scrap the recreational pot law altogether.
So I’m not terribly convinced by the claims of pot propagandists that we’ll soon see recreational weed shops popping up all over Greater Boston and beyond. Then again, I’m not smoking anything, so maybe that’s why I just don’t see it.
