The Repeal Playbook
They are done debating cannabis. They are debating whether adults can be trusted to run it.
“You cannot win the Super Bowl on Wednesday, but you can lose it.”
Cannabis is living in the week before the Super Bowl right now.
The Monday-after takes are loud. Everyone has a theory. That makes for decent TV. The part that decides outcomes happens earlier, in the quiet. Film study. Tendencies. Tells. The realism of self-scouting, including the stuff you wish your opponent would ignore.
You cannot win the Super Bowl on Wednesday, but you can lose it.
This is a scouting report on the repeal movement. It is also a mirror for the legal market, because the opposition’s best material comes from the places where the system is most vulnerable.
The line everyone repeats
You hear it everywhere now, usually delivered with the tone of somebody trying to sound practical and world-weary.
“This isn’t your grandparents’ weed.”
Sure. Potency is higher. Formats are engineered. A gummy behaves differently than whatever stems and seeds you and your friends passed around behind a shed.
The part that never gets said is the part that matters politically. In a regulated market, cannabis is grown by someone in your own town, in a licensed facility, under rules that exist on paper and, when the system is working, exist in practice. It has a batch number. It gets tested. It moves through a track-and-trace system. It is sold across a counter by a business that can be inspected, fined, suspended, shut down.
The cannabis that grandpa and his buddies smoked, or the cannabis many of us smoked, came out of a trunk. It was a friend of a friend, a handshake, a shrug. Nobody knew where it was grown. Nobody knew what it was sprayed with. Nobody knew what else it touched on the way to your hand. It was likely stems, seeds, and mystery, and you made your peace with that because you did not have another option. It also could have been premium and craft. In that case, I hope that grower migrated to the legal market with their genetics intact.
That contrast carried legalization across the finish line. Regulation was supposed to be safer than the trunk.
The repeal playbook is designed to argue that the promise did not hold.
Massachusetts as Exhibit A
Massachusetts matters because the mechanics are already in motion, and because it is a mature market with the kind of public record campaign strategists love.
The repeal initiative titled “An Act to Restore a Sensible Marijuana Policy” cleared the first signature threshold and has been “transmitted” to the Legislature. Lawmakers have until the first Wednesday in May to act. If they do nothing, the campaign can pursue a second round of signatures with an early July deadline to qualify for the November ballot.
That calendar matters. This is a campaign with deadlines, not a complaint with a microphone.
The structure matters, too. The initiative preserves simple possession. It preserves medical. It trains its fire on commercial adult-use retail sales. That is deliberate. It gives the persuadable middle a way to vote for rollback without feeling punitive. It reads as moderation, even as it aims at the heart of the legal market.
Then there is capacity. Reporting and campaign finance coverage have put the Massachusetts committee’s funding at roughly $1.55 million, all from SAM Action, a 501(c)(4) that does not disclose its donors. That is not conspiracy as much as it is capacity and firepower.
Maine and Arizona belong in the same sentence for a reason. Maine’s repeal effort missed its 2026 signature deadline, which pushes any ballot attempt to a later cycle. Arizona’s effort has been described as led by Sean Noble of American Encore, with reporting noting that the campaign is funded in part by Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM).
Different local mechanics, same national playbook. Adult possession spared. Medical preserved. Retail targeted. SAM money present. You can debate the internal wiring. The external reality is plain. The model is traveling.
And the model runs on one argument.
The competence attack
These campaigns are not trying to convince the public to hate cannabis. They know they lose that fight in most places that matter, because the public already delivered a verdict and moved on. They are trying to convince the middle to distrust the system that sells it now. The elusive average voter.
That messaging does not require moral panic. It requires doubt, repeated until it starts to feel like common sense. They will take voters on a guided tour of the weak points.
They will start with kids, because society’s protective instincts are the most reliable lever in politics. Pediatric edible exposures. Accidental ingestion. Poison control calls. Emergency room visits. A parent who thought a product was mild. A clinician who looks exhausted and angry. Campaigns do not need to win an epidemiology debate. They need one credible face and a simple conclusion.
And there is enough data to feed that story. CDC syndromic surveillance found cannabis-involved emergency department visit ratios among children age ten and under that climbed after 2021 and peaked during the summer of 2022, with the visit ratio reaching 4.0 per 10,000 ED visits in that period.
They will move to potency, because it sounds like science and feels like loss of control. Data from the University of Mississippi’s federally funded Potency Monitoring Program, long operated under federal contract, shows delta-9 THC potency in illegal cannabis products rising sharply over time, quadrupling from 3.96% in 1995 to 16.14% in 2022. Concentrates will be presented as proof that the market has outgrown its guardrails.
They will cite studies linking heavy, high-potency use to elevated mental health risks. They will bring up cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, the clinical term for cycles of nausea and vomiting associated with heavy, chronic use. They will use “scromiting” as the sticky slang for it because the phrase is vivid and television loves vivid.
They will hammer “gas station THC,” because voters already know it exists. Intoxicating products sold outside of licensed, age-gated systems, often derived from hemp cannabinoids under the Farm Bill framework, in packaging and placements that look casual to a parent and opportunistic to a teenager.
They will talk about impaired driving. They will not explain the difference between THC presence and impairment. They will show wrecks, grieving families, and footage of drivers who made a bad choice, then ask why commercialization arrived faster than enforcement capacity.
“Legalization promised adult supervision. Commercialization delivered a hall pass.”
They will reach for foreign criminal involvement as a headline engine, because it sharpens fear and widens the coalition. There is a real enforcement record here in multiple states, including sophisticated illegal cultivation operations and trafficking networks operating alongside the licensed market. A serious reader can hold two ideas at once: some campaigns will weaponize the framing, and the underlying problem still demands real enforcement.
Then they will widen the aperture to the regulator. Audits. Missed deadlines. Public infighting. Leadership churn. Process failures. They will aim for one impression: the referee cannot manage the game.
And then they will land the punch.
Legalization promised adult supervision. Commercialization delivered a hall pass.
That argument works because it rides on real vulnerabilities. The ads will not have to invent them. They will use the footage that already exists.
Concede what is real
The industry has a habit of treating every critique as an attack on legalization itself. That reflex made sense in the first era of legalization, when the politics were cultural and the opponents were loud and easy to spot.
It is a mistake in the current terrain.
The middle is not looking for a defense of the idea. They are looking for proof that someone is running the system. That proof does not come from a glossy defense of legalization. It comes from the unglamorous parts of regulation executed with discipline and made visible enough for the public to trust.
Start with channels and age gates. If a product intoxicates, it belongs in a regulated channel with real age verification and real enforcement. The average voter does not care about the Farm Bill. They care about whether a teenager can buy an intoxicating product from the same counter that sells scratch tickets.
Gas station THC should not exist.
It should be banned from general retail. It should be enforced against. It should be treated as a public safety problem, because it is one, and because leaving it unaddressed allows repeal advocates to argue, persuasively, that legalization created a system where intoxication is sold casually.
A carveout matters here. Low-dose hemp beverages can be part of a responsible, supervised lane when the serving size is legible, the labeling is boring, the marketing is adult, and the oversight is real. Broader acceptance of THC can be good for cannabis broadly. A 50mg tallboy in a gas station does reputational damage far beyond the seller.
Then comes the part that decides whether the entire category is believable: testing.
Sampling becomes decisive. A lab that games potency does not only cheat its customers. It poisons the credibility of every operator trying to play this straight. Fixing this requires independent sampling, random and blind re-testing, meaningful audits, and penalties that actually end careers in the market when fraud is proven. A market that rewards inflated potency teaches people to lie.
After that, potency and serving-size standards have to match the products actually in circulation. Voters can tolerate adult choice. They do not tolerate a system that shrugs at extreme products while pretending old rules still fit. If your serving size requires a compliance consultant and a calculator, you are handing your opponents a gift.
Impaired driving has to be treated as a public safety priority with proportional investment. Better training. Better data. Clear public education that does not sound evasive. Visible enforcement capacity. The point is to lower risk on roads where voters live. Do not drive high, and do not guess.
And the state has to draw a bright line between licensed commerce and illegal commerce, then enforce it like it means it. Not performative raids. Consistent pressure on illicit grows, diversion, and organized trafficking. Voters can understand the difference between a regulated store and an illegal operation when they see government act like it understands it, too.
This is what serious oversight looks like. It requires seriousness.
One corner becomes everyone’s problem
There is one more lesson from the repeal playbook that the industry should not miss.
Internal fragmentation becomes external vulnerability.
“Loose enforcement on one corner of the market bleeds into the public’s perception of all corners.”
Hemp and marijuana factions are fighting over thresholds, channels, and definitions. Some of those fights are legitimate. In public, they read as a category that cannot agree on what responsibility means. That becomes an easy story for opponents. Chaos inside the tent becomes evidence that commercialization cannot be trusted.
Loose enforcement on one corner of the market bleeds into the public’s perception of all corners. Gas station THC becomes a problem for the licensed dispensary. A testing scandal in one state becomes a credibility problem for responsible operators in another. A regulator’s public dysfunction becomes a statewide impression that nobody is minding the store.
A mature market does not tolerate actors who hand opponents free footage. The unlicensed delivery services. The operators who divert product out the back door. The labs and brands that treat testing like a marketing tool. They do not just harm customers. They drag down everyone who is trying to run a serious business inside a fragile political bargain.
The repeal campaign is counting on the industry to keep tolerating that behavior.
It is also counting on regulators to keep providing clips that make the oversight apparatus look unserious. Scathing audits and missed deadlines compound it. So does public infighting. Leadership turmoil becomes its own kind of B-roll.
I have sat inside that machine. I know how hard the job is. I also know the job includes the optics. Public trust is part of the infrastructure. You do not get to run oversight like a private workplace and then act surprised when voters treat internal dysfunction as proof that the system is not under control.
The Monday after the Super Bowl turns the whole country into an expert. Cannabis is living in the week before it.
That earlier game about legalization got played in most legal states, and it got decided. The next vote is about trust. It is about whether anyone looks like they are running the system.
That is a hard standard, and it is a fair one. Voters struck a bargain. Adults can buy cannabis within a system that is safer, more transparent, and more controlled than the trunk.
If the system looks governed, repeal fails.
If the system looks optional, the repeal playbook writes itself.
The other side is studying the tape.
So should we.
