Acting cannabis commission chair and state senator feud over agency's direction
State Sen. Michael Moore (D-Worcester)
The Cannabis Control Commission will hold a policy-heavy meeting Thursday, but it's likely to be overshadowed by a court hearing involving the agency's suspended chairwoman who argues she is being pushed out of her job as a result of her attempts to clean up a dysfunctional agency. And as that story continues to dominate the headlines, the CCC's acting chair said Wednesday she believes "there is an intentional push to create a narrative that's not necessarily true."
It's been a bumpy half-year for the CCC as personal conflicts at the agency burst into the headlines. While the ongoing drama surrounding suspended Chairwoman Shannon O'Brien, former Executive Director Shawn Collins and Treasurer Deborah Goldberg has received practically all of the attention paid to the CCC, the agency has been busy plugging away at major policy initiatives.
"It's a very one-sided narrative that's sort of been perpetuated. And I do want to note ... the only thing that people really know about in terms of the current status of the CCC has really been in media publications through the lens of Shannon O'Brien, what she's made available to the public, her court filings, her positions," Commissioner Ava Callender Concepcion, who has been serving as acting chair since September, told the News Service on Wednesday. "And it's unfortunate that it's taken a lot away from what we're actually doing at the CCC."
She added, "We've been busy. We had regulations that were completed on timeframe, we're talking about delivery licenses [Thursday], we voted on microbusinesses, social consumption's still happening. So we continue to do our jobs here and focus on the bigger picture."
Last month, the CCC officially filed its newest regulations intended to reflect the cannabis industry reform law that former Gov. Charlie Baker signed last summer. The CCC spent months this spring and summer rewriting the regulations that had been in place since legal marijuana sales started in 2018, hoping to increase diversity in the field, ramp up oversight on agreements between marijuana businesses and municipalities and get closer to social pot consumption sites.
And a discussion planned for Thursday's CCC meeting will get into some of the nitty-gritty policy details around delivery licenses, a business type the CCC authorized with hopes of lowering the bar to entering the newly-legal industry particularly for entrepreneurs from communities disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs. Thursday's meeting will also include a discussion among commissioners around whether Concepcion should continue serving as acting chair.
A lot of the CCC's recent policy work stems from that new law, known as Chapter 180. Concepcion said it's hard to hide her frustration about the fact that people had put so much effort into passing that law and the CCC was at a critical point in its implementation when O'Brien in July stunned the other commissioners by declaring the agency "in crisis" and airing personal matters in public.
"To get to such a pivotal point, and then have that overshadowed is so disappointing, that's the nicest way I can put it," she said. "I also don't think it's a coincidence. I'm sort of reading the tea leaves right now. You know, when did this sort of narrative happen? Who exactly are the main proponents for the idea of us not functioning? When in actuality, if you're actually looking at what we're doing on a day-to-day [basis] or even if you're paying attention at our biweekly meetings, you see that the work continues."
Concepcion added, "So I just think there is an intentional push to create a narrative that's not necessarily true."
And she placed blame for starting that narrative squarely on O'Brien and also faulted Sen. Michael Moore, a Millbury Democrat who has been outspoken in his calls for greater oversight of the CCC, for allegedly perpetuating it.
"The narrative was created by the very same person who is no longer here actively, is suspended, and mirrored by a singular senator. And that's not lost on me either. I'm speaking about Senator Moore. That's someone who I've tried, even before becoming acting chair, when we were drafting regulations, he vocalized his opposition to a component of the law that he voted for. And so I reached out to speak with him on a number of occasions and he was not, he would not meet with with me or anyone that I'm aware of in an official capacity here at the CCC. So we're trying to really gain as much insight as possible to do our jobs and make sure that we're evolving as an agency as we mature."
Moore's office provided the News Service with emails from August showing that a CCC official reached out looking to schedule a time for a call between the senator and Commissioners Concepcion and Nurys Camargo, and that Moore's office responded by saying the senator "would be interested in joining the call" and proposing three dates/times for it. Moore's office said the only response it got came five days later when a CCC government affairs official said they would get back in touch soon, but never did.
"Given that nearly the entire leadership team has quit or been suspended in the past year, that the CCC has been entrenched in expensive private mediation, and that issues related to cannabis worker safety, market prices, and other industry concerns persist, I believe the disfunction [sic] at the Cannabis Control Commission is obvious. CCC leadership should be focused on fixing an agency that is in deep disarray instead of targeting those calling for reasonable oversight," Moore said in a statement responding to Concepcion's comments. "Denial and building a wall of secrecy around its internal practices will not fix the agency’s problems. I want to make myself clear: attacks and false accusations will not intimidate me into backing down from my calls for oversight of the CCC."
In this year alone, the CCC has had to contend with the departures of some of its highest-ranking employees, including its executive director, chairwoman, general counsel, chief operating officer and chief financial officer. Asked if that steady string of departures says anything about the commission, Concepcion said she thinks "that happens."
"That's normal. That's normal and it will happen, and we might get more, it might happen. But we're growing and we're maturing," she said. "I think at one point it was very clear that nobody really knew what the CCC would be, what the regulated industry would be. And so there was a startup phase, there was a whole different iteration of commissioners. And now we've reached that pivotal point ... where we're reaching maturity."
And a CCC spokesperson confirmed Wednesday that Director of Human Resources Justin Shrader "voluntarily resigned" from the agency effective Dec. 5. At least two reporters -- independent journalist Grant Smith Ellis and WBUR's Walter Wuthmann -- reported that Shrader and Chief Communications Officer Cedric Sinclair had been suspended by interim Executive Director Debbie Hilton-Creek on Dec. 4.
The CCC has not confirmed or denied Sinclair's suspension, saying it does not comment on personnel matters. Phone calls to Sinclair last week were met with a message saying that "the person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this time."
Shrader and Sinclair were both named in an affidavit O'Brien filed in which she detailed internal turmoil at the agency. Shrader was mentioned as the person who initiated a second investigation into O'Brien. And the chairwoman wrote that she had made a complaint against Sinclair, who she said "had repeatedly attempted to undermine me even attempting to have me removed as a Commissioner."
Asked whether she thinks there was or is a culture problem at the CCC, Concepcion said that it was obvious to anyone watching the July meeting at which O'Brien labeled the agency as "in crisis" and the meetings that followed "that tensions were higher, and that was visible." A lawyer representing O'Brien did not respond to a request for a response to Concepcion's statements about the suspended chair.
Concepcion said that she "would love to get to a point where we're not talking about individuals, but more so on the industry itself. Let's talk about cannabis again." But she also said that some people "are missing the timeline of things" and pointed out that every commissioner except O'Brien had served under a different chairperson without issue.
"When has this narrative surfaced? When was that sort of continued? When was that amplified? I think that is telling within itself too," she said. "It's not a coincidence. And you have to ask yourself, who stands to benefit from that?"
When that very question was posed to Concepcion, she declined to name anyone specific who she thought was benefiting from the drama around the CCC.
"Certainly not the industry. Certainly not the industry and the people of the commonwealth, certainly not the people who I'm trying to work for," she said. "It's a few. It's only a select few, one in particular. And I'll just, you know, I'll let you use your own deductive reasoning."
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