Polls suggest support for a legal recreational market has increased since voters approved it a decade ago.

A decade ago, 54 percent of Massachusetts voters said yes to Question 4, a ballot initiative that legalized possession, home cultivation, and commercial distribution of recreational marijuana. Judging from recent surveys, voters are not inclined to reverse that decision by approving Question 8, an initiative on next Tuesday’s ballot.

Question 8, a.k.a. the Eliminate Recreational Marijuana Sales and Allow Limited Possession Initiative, would permit adults 21 or older to possess up to an ounce of cannabis. But they would have to get it from the black market, since Question 8 would not allow them to grow it or buy it from state-licensed retailers.

The initiative “would keep personal possession of marijuana legal, keep medical marijuana legal, and stop commercial marijuana stores,” its supporters say. They allege that legalization has impaired “productivity” and led to increases in “fatal car accidents,” “workplace injuries,” “healthcare costs,” “crime (like DUI’s),” “ER visits,” and “mental health conditions like psychosis, severe anxiety, and schizophrenia, particularly in young adults.”

Voters do not seem impressed by those arguments. In eight polls between mid-February and mid-October, support for Question 8 ranged from 20 percent to 41 percent. In the most recent survey, conducted by The Boston Globe, 71 percent of respondents said they planned to vote no on Question 8, which suggests that experience with legalization has substantially increased opposition to pot prohibition in Massachusetts.

Read more Massachusetts Voters Don’t Seem Inclined To Repeal Marijuana Legalization

xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, sḵwx̱wú7mesh & səlilwətaɬ territory| Vancouver, BC | September 29, 2026 – In a landmark ruling that could alter the fabric of drug policy in Canada, the BC Supreme Court has found that the criminal law used to arrest and convict DULF co-founders Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx is unconstitutional. The Court ruled that section 5(2) of the CDSA violates the Section 7 and Section 15 Charter rights of DULF co-founders and people who use drugs. The  Judge declared section 5(2) of the CDSA invalid (of no force or effect), effective six months from today. This delay is to give the opportunity for the legislature to craft a response.  

In finding section 5(2) of the CDSA unconstitutional, the Court has issued a “stay of proceedings” against Kalicum and Nyx. This means that no convictions will be entered against them and they cannot be prosecuted again for the DULF compassion club activities that were the subject of this court case. 

Read more from the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition

by Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director

The New York Times is setting its sights on cannabis, again. Their primary concerns? Marijuana is too strong and too many people are using it.

However, a deeper dive into both issues reveals that there’s far more to the story than the NYT is reporting.

Read more at NORML

The Netherlands’ experiment to introduce regulated cannabis into its coffeeshop system is going well, despite some growing pains, according to the first follow-up study after the program launched in 2025.

The Dutch Government launched its Controlled Cannabis Supply Chain Experiment in April 2025, as part of a plan for a “closed cannabis chain” for dozens of cannabis coffeeshops in ten cities across the country. The experiment is planned to continue through the end of 2029, with the goal of better understanding how to fully regulate cannabis sold in the Netherlands. 

The first review looked at the period from April 7, 2025, to the first quarter of 2026. The study compares the ten municipalities where coffeeshops sell cannabis exclusively from regulated growers with ten comparison municipalities that follow the country’s long-standing toleration policy. That policy has tolerated coffeeshops selling cannabis without regulating their supply. 

Read more at Stratcann

The full official transcript of a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) hearing on the Trump administration’s marijuana rescheduling proposal has now been made available to the public.

The release of the day-by-day record of the cannabis rescheduling proceedings comes after DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek Julius ordered that dozens of mostly small and technical changes be made to an initial draft.

The full transcript runs 2,533 pages for the full 11 days of the proceedings and reveals DEA’s effort to advocate on behalf of the move to reschedule marijuana as well as opponents’ attempts to undermine it.

“The Government is not putting forth any evidence to suggest that marijuana is not dangerous. All controlled substances by definition are dangerous,” James Schwartz, a DEA attorney, said on the opening day of the hearing, according to the transcript. “That is why they are scheduled in the first place. However, controlled substances must be evaluated by the risks they pose balanced with the medical use they provide.”

“The proposed rule, the supporting documents, and the Government witnesses will establish that marijuana has a currently accepted medical use,” he said. “With that determination, marijuana can no longer remain in Schedule I.”

Read more at Marijuana Moment

After nearly eighteen years, including fifteen years as the Executive Director, I will be leaving IDPC at the end of July 2026. This has been an extraordinary journey, travelled alongside so many remarkable people. The drug policy reform movement has become my family and shaped me in ways I could never have imagined.

Looking back to my first encounter with the global drug policy and harm reduction movement at the 2008 International Harm Reduction Conference in Barcelona, I realise now that it was love at first sight. I was excited to meet people from all over the world who were doing brave and difficult work, from providing peer-to-peer needle and syringe services in Manipur, to driving a mobile safe injection van around Kyiv, to supporting pregnant women who use drugs in Vancouver. They worked at the margins, under challenging conditions, with little funding or government support and usually under the threat of criminalisation. What struck me most was the fierce courage and compassion of this movement. I also found hope – not a naïve optimism that everything will work out, but what Mariame Kaba calls “hope as a discipline” – choosing, every day, to keep working for change even when progress feels painfully slow.

Continues at IDPC

Late last month, the United Nations published its annual World Drug Report, chronicling the latest developments in the global war on drugs. Not only are the drugs winning that war, but there are greater quantities and more varieties of recreational chemicals available than ever before.

In June, Colombia elected a hard-line new president who vowed to wage “all-out war, without truce or negotiation” on the narcos and guerrillas, while Bolivia’s embattled government has declared a state of emergency against “narco-terrorism.” It will be an uphill battle: According to the U.N. report, an estimated 4,100 tons of cocaine were produced in South America in 2024—more than at any point in history. Even after decades of government-run initiatives and even military campaigns involving ripping up coca fields and spraying them with herbicide, farmers in the Andes have adopted innovative cultivation techniques making their humble patches more productive than ever before.

Read more at Reason Magazine

Lawyers for marijuana reform opponents that are participating in a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) hearing on the Trump administration’s cannabis rescheduling proposal put significant focus on the second day of the proceedings on pressing a government witness about recently adopted changes to an analysis used to determine whether drugs have accepted medical value.

A separate government witness who began his testimony on Tuesday focused on cannabis’s role in treating pain patients and its relative safety compared to opioids.

Under federal law, drugs that have a currently accepted medical use (CAMU) cannot be classified in Schedule I, the most restrictive category. For years, officials had used a five-part test to determine a substance’s medical utility that involved an analysis of whether its chemistry is known and reproducible, safety studies, research proving efficacy, acceptance by qualified experts and widely available scientific evidence.

But in 2023 to evaluate marijuana, they switched to a new two-part analysis that looks at whether there is widespread, current experience with medical use of the substance by licensed health care providers operating in accordance with state laws and, if so, whether there is some credible scientific support for at least one of the medical conditions it is being used for.

The latest World Drug Report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), published today, once again provides a wealth of data on global drug markets and drug use trends. And yet, despite documenting, year after year, the expansion of the illegal drug trade, the persistence of health and other harms, and the ineffectiveness of punitive responses, the report yet again falls devastatingly short of condemning the egregious human rights abuses resulting from prohibition, nor does it engage seriously with the policy alternatives and potential solutions that are increasingly being adopted by governments and endorsed by other parts of the UN system.

Read more on the International Drug Policy Consortium blog.