05.21.2024

No end to home price increases | Campus crazies had planned major escalation | Stirring the pot again at the cannabis commission | Mass. exodus | Special counsel proposed to go after Steward | Quick hits |

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Dazed and confused: Amid turmoil, state’s stumbling pot watchdog seeks new executive director

Not even seven years old, the Cannabis Control Commission has already earned a reputation as one of the most dysfunctional state regulators around.

And given we are talking about Massachusetts and its reputation for shenanigans in state government, that’s saying something.

Now, the timing of the pot commission’s latest move - launching a search for a new executive director - is raising eyebrows.

The last time we checked, the fate of Shannon O’Brien, the commission’s suspended chair, still hangs in the balance, as the one-time Democratic nominee for governor battles what she contends are ginned up racism charges.

But if O’Brien eventually prevails, she could wind up working with a new executive director she had no say in picking, as the cannabis regulator is now seeking applications for its top administrative post, which pays up to $187,000 a year.

Photo by Shelby Ireland on Unsplash

“I do think they should wait,” state Sen. Michael Moore, who has been critical of the pot’s commission management, tells Contrarian Boston.

State Treasurer Deb Goldberg, who appoints the chair of the CCC, suspended O’Brien last September. The heir to the Stop & Shop fortune, Goldberg recently held closed-door hearings that could determine whether O’Brien is given her walking papers as the cannabis commission chair, or reinstated.

Goldberg is weighing O’Brien’s alleged racist comments - which the erstwhile CCC chair contends were taken out of context - as well as beefs that Shawn Collins, the former executive director, had against O’Brien, who was his boss.

The commission has been without an executive director since December, when Collins left and then started his own cannabis business with a former law school classmate, Nick Adamopoulos.

For his part, Adamopoulos just happened to previously work as an attorney for Greatest Hits, a cannabis firm that was under investigation by the CCC during Collins’ tenure.

The old revolving door: what a great look for an already troubled agency.

O’Brien has credibly argued that her remarks were perfectly innocent - that she was simply repeating a phrase, once popular back in the Rainbow Coalition days of the 1980s, that a prominent African-American businessman had used in a conversation with her on diversity.

Rather, she contends that the accusations are the work of staffers and some commissioners at the pot agency opposed to her efforts to reform the commission. In fact, her lawyers have argued that staffers had even resurrected a “playbook” that had been previously used to drive out unwanted bosses and commissioners through the use of baseless allegations.

Meanwhile, amid chronic infighting, over the past two years the CCC has racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses and on sessions with a mediation firm, even as it continues to pay O’Brien’s salary and that of another suspended top official.

“Those are taxpayer dollars that are going out the door, funding these salaries while the individuals aren’t working,” said Moore, a Millbury Democrat.

Just in time? In days before Harvard, other universities ordered encampments to clear out, some activists had pushed for a major escalation

That appears to have been the plan of Palestine Action US, a shadowy group whose rhetoric is straight out of 1968, with rants about the “pigs,” the “ruling class,” and vague but repeated calls for “revolution.”

Previously known for attempting to shut down the US offices of Israeli defense contractor Elbit in Cambridge and elsewhere, Palestine Action US threw its energies into the campus protests in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attack by Hamas on Israel.

By early May the group, which includes a local former Markey volunteer, issued a manifesto calling on supporters to “break open the university gates,” seize university buildings, and resist arrest.