Brookline residents are divided over a proposed statewide ballot question that would repeal Massachusetts’ legalization of recreational cannabis, with supporters arguing the policy has contributed to youth drug use and opponents warning that reversing it could revive inequities from the era of prohibition.

The proposal, titled “An Act to Restore a Sensible Cannabis Policy,” has been filed in two versions by its sponsors, the Coalition for a Healthy Massachusetts.

Both versions would eliminate licensed retail sales of recreational cannabis while allowing adults 21 and older to possess limited amounts of cannabis and preserving the state’s medical cannabis program.

However, version A of the petition would also limit the potency of medical cannabis products, a provision supporters say addresses concerns about increasingly high-THC cannabis products. Version B is identical except for that provision. 

Preliminary polling indicates the proposal has not yet persuaded Bay Staters. The University of New Hampshire released findings last month showing 63% of respondents oppose either version.

However, in Brookline, where cannabis policy has been a recurring flashpoint since dispensaries first opened, some residents remain hopeful the repeal effort will succeed.

Among them is Susan Park, a Town Meeting member who helped organize the Concerned Citizens of Coolidge Corner, a group that opposed a proposed cannabis dispensary on Beacon Street in 2019. Park later ran unsuccessfully for Select Board in 2024 on a platform that included curtailing retail cannabis in the town.

Park pointed to survey data cited in the 2023 Brookline Marijuana Landscape Assessment, which draws on the 2023 Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

“Overall, 13% of BHS student respondents to the MYRBS reported having used cannabis in the past 30 days,” she wrote in an email, with usage rising by grade level to “30%, almost one in three, among 12th graders.”

Park said those figures suggest legalization has not been accompanied by sufficient efforts to prevent youth use.

“The narrative that cannabis is totally safe is false,” she wrote. “More needs to be done to educate our youth that cannabis is addictive.”

Park argued that legalization occurred too quickly without sufficient safeguards.

“With legalization of cannabis, there was a responsibility to make sure our youth are educated, protected, and safe,” she wrote. “This was not adequately done.”

At the same time, Park said her concerns center on recreational use rather than the medical cannabis program.

“Let’s be clear,” she wrote. “We are not talking about medical cannabis. People who need cannabis for illnesses should get their cannabis.”

Regulation and repair, or prohibition and punishment?

Others in Brookline disagree. Zahriyannah Karakashian-Jones, a Brookline resident who previously worked extensively with local youth as manager of programs and partners at the Brookline Community Foundation, said recriminalization would fail to keep cannabis out of high schoolers’ hands while reviving problems the regulated system was meant to address.

“If the theme is cannabis harms children,” she said, “then the answer should be tighter regulation, prevention, and enforcement against selling to minors, not eliminating licensed sales and handing the market back over to unregulated sources.”

She also argued that the legal market includes safety standards that do not exist with underground sales.

“The beauty of having regulation is that it allows testing, ID checks, labeling, potency controls, and reduces contamination risk,” she said. “Illicit markets don’t have that.”

Karakashian-Jones said the ballot question also raises concerns about the history of cannabis enforcement in the United States, where arrests and criminal penalties disproportionately affected Black and brown communities.

“The people that are always punished the most are communities of color,” she said. “The question is whether we want to handle cannabis through regulation and repair or through prohibition and punishment.”

View from a dispensary

Cannabis businesses also oppose the repeal effort. 

New England Treatment Access, known as NETA, opened in Brookline Village as a medical dispensary and later became the first recreational cannabis retailer in the Greater Boston area when it began adult-use sales in 2019. There are currently two other retailers in Brookline or on the border line with Boston.

“Massachusetts voters approved adult-use cannabis nearly a decade ago, and since then the regulated market has generated billions in economic activity, supported tens of thousands of jobs, and produced hundreds of millions of dollars each year in tax revenue that funds important public programs and local services,” wrote Jervonne Singletary, vice president of compliance and government relations at Parallel, NETA’s parent company.

“Repealing adult-use cannabis would push sales back into the illicit market, increase burdens on law enforcement, expose consumers to untested and unsafe products, and punish law-abiding businesses and citizens,” Singletary said.

‘It has to stop’

For one Brookline parent of a ninth-grade student at Brookline High School, concerns about youth access feel especially personal. She said she discovered two cannabis vape cartridges in her child’s backpack during the first week of freshman year last September. Since then, she said, the family has been in what she described as an eight-month “cat and mouse chase,” repeatedly finding cannabis paraphernalia among her child’s belongings.

“I don’t know where she’s getting it. I’m not a detective,” said the parent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the stigma surrounding youth drug use.

Still, she believes legalization may have made it easier for cannabis to reach teenagers through informal resale.

“All they need to do is show ID now, boom. They get it, come out, sell it to someone else, who sells it to someone else.”

The parent, whose child has an Individualized Education Program, said she was further alarmed after reading the Brookline Marijuana Landscape Assessment. The report found that 21.8% of Brookline High School students in grades 9 and 10 with an Individualized Education Program reported having ever used cannabis, compared with 10.2% of students without an IEP.

In recent months, she said she has noticed concerning changes in her child’s behavior that she attributes to cannabis use.

“Her attitude, her behavior, has completely changed,” the parent said. “She’s refusing school. She just doesn’t want to go. She’s lethargic.”

The experience is why she plans to vote yes on the ballot question to repeal recreational cannabis sales.

“We want our children to do well and be successful in life, but the opposite is happening,” she said. “It has to stop.”

A medical cannabis perspective

But Colleen Powell, 62, a cancer survivor who grew up in Brookline and is now a medical cannabis patient at NETA, said eliminating recreational sales would undermine a system many patients rely on. She first turned to medical cannabis after chemotherapy left her struggling with fatigue and pain that interfered with daily life.

“Once I learned what different strains do, I was able to manage my pain and my energy level,” she said. “It was really a life-changing thing for me.”

Powell said the expansion of recreational dispensaries has helped lower prices by increasing competition.

“I would not want to see that end and all of a sudden I’m paying double or triple what I’m currently paying,” she said. 

Powell said she also believes, as a matter of principle, that adults should be able to choose whether to use cannabis for themselves. 

“I see it as equal to alcohol,” she said. “Adults deserve the ability to relax.”

Addressing concerns about youth access, Powell, who attended Brookline High School in the late 1970s and early 1980s, said cannabis was already used among teenagers long before legalization and would likely remain so even if recreational sales were repealed.

“Yes,” she said, laughing. “Kids were smoking pot when I was in high school.”