When will Massachusetts allow Cannabis lounges?
Worcester's Summit Lounge Operates in Regulatory Gray Area Amid Delayed Cannabis Social Consumption Regulations.
There was a time when it might have been considered surprising: In a state where cannabis lounges were not yet licensed, a Worcester lounge was open for business.
Cannabis connoisseurs could arrive, get high, and hang out, just as if they were nursing a beer at a bar down the street.
But to call the Summit Lounge an open secret would be the wrong designation.
The lounge, which operates as a private club, has 12,000 members. Everyone — Worcester city councilors, police, public health officials, and even the state’s Cannabis Control Commission — knows about it.
“You can come down there, you can rent a bong, you can smoke a 2-gram dab if you want,” owner Kyle Moon said, referring to concentrated marijuana. “And then you can put your stuff in your pocket and you can leave the building.”
The Summit Lounge is one of an unknown number of establishments operating in a gray area of Massachusetts’ cannabis law.
The lounge isn’t selling drugs, placing it out of reach of state cannabis regulators.
Members pay $10 per visit, self-supply their weed, and can smoke it as they please while unwinding in a dimly-lit back room blocks from Polar Park, home of the Worcester Red Sox. If not for the lack of a fluorescent “Samuel Adams” sign and a back bar stocked with liquor, the Summit Lounge could pass as another local pub.
Moon has operated the lounge for more than six years while waiting, he said, for the commission to issue licenses for social consumption businesses — commercial establishments where cannabis can be consumed on-site.
In Massachusetts, where people who publicly smoke pot risk a $100 fine, advocates say cannabis cafes or similar businesses would be a haven for tourists and residents of apartments or public housing where the drug is not allowed — not to mention a popular new draw and expansion of the booming regional cannabis industry.
Even as retail marijuana prices sunk last year to their lowest point since pot shops opened in 2018, the state’s cannabis sellers notched a record $1.56 billion in sales. Nearly 100,000 medical marijuana patients accounted for another $225 million.
Of the 24 states that have legalized marijuana, half allow pot lounges or some other form of on-site use. Massachusetts is not one of them.
Bay State voters allowed such businesses when they legalized recreational weed in 2016. But for several reasons, and to the irritation of hopeful business owners, the commission is still drafting regulations for social consumption.
Cannabis Commissioner Bruce Stebbins, who is helping lead efforts to regulate social consumption, said work is progressing toward a regulatory “framework.”
He said commission officials have studied social consumption in other states and hope to write regulations that keep the public safe while allowing businesses to turn a profit.
“A colleague has referred to regulatory agencies sometimes as ‘sloths on Ambien,’” he remarked earlier this spring. “I’ve said we’re a regulatory agency trying to keep up with an industry that really wants to be innovative and entrepreneurial.”
Absent official regulations, business owners have taken it upon themselves to operate as they are able.
Similar to Moon, Samantha Kanter operates a social consumption business, Dinner at Mary’s, in the murky void left open by the lack of state guidelines.
Her Boston-based business caters private meals using a cannabis-infused olive oil and hosts cannabis-friendly yoga sessions and other events.
But where Moon sells memberships to cannabis consumers who “BYOC,” Kanter uses a “gifting model,” she said. Customers pay for a yoga lesson or catered meal; the weed is a bonus.
For many, the default image of social consumption is akin to a cigar lounge or bar, but for marijuana — similar to the Summit Lounge, or Amsterdam’s famed cannabis coffeeshops.
But prospective business owners also envision outdoor hangouts akin to beer gardens, pot-friendly music venues, spas where customers can toke up before a massage, cannabis festivals with legal on-site consumption, and much more.
The Boston Globe recently told the story of a Somerville dispensary hosting weekly stoned knitting circles. Since the shop lacks a social consumption license, any smoking occurs offsite beforehand.
Kanter has even higher dreams: “At Fenway [Park], you should be able to get a seltzer infused with cannabis and a seltzer with booze in it.”
Both she and Moon have been open about their businesses — and their concerns that the Cannabis Control Commission has been too slow to regulate social consumption.
The board drafted regulations in 2017. But it held off on issuing licenses amid concerns from then-Gov. Charlie Baker and others about how lounges would avoid over-serving patrons and how they would account for other safety issues.
Social consumption was further delayed by an issue with state law that left unclear how municipalities could decide to allow on-site cannabis consumption businesses. The state Legislature corrected that problem in 2022.
The commission also had planned to introduce social consumption with a pilot program limited to 12 communities.
The board scuttled that idea last year. Stebbins, who co-chairs the working group developing social consumption regulations, said keeping the pilot program could have delayed the rollout of social consumption by “easily at least two years.”
Last year the commission held three public meetings and sent a survey to 1,000 cannabis businesses statewide to gather input on social consumption.
Stebbins said the working group plans to release a framework for social consumption regulations this year, though a lengthy process would remain before the commission finalized the regulations themselves.
To some hopeful business owners, it sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare.
In March, at the New England Cannabis Convention in Boston, Stebbins sat on a panel titled, “What’s Taking So Long? Social Consumption in Massachusetts.”
Indeed, eight months had passed since Stebbins and fellow commissioner Nurys Camargo said their working group would unveil a “regulatory proposal to the full commission in the near future.”
When the panel took questions, Kanter, Moon, and others chastised the commission’s regulatory pace.
“We want the license. We want the regulations. We want to be good corporate citizens. So why isn’t there a license?” Moon asked. “I don’t understand it and I’ve been struggling with it for six years.”
“I know the message is, ‘What’s taking so long?’” Stebbins responded. He remains optimistic about the possibility for the regulations to be written by the end of this year.
But licensed cannabis lounges open for business are likely far off.
“I don’t see an actual establishment opening for at least three to four years,” Moon said.
Even with commission regulations in writing, individual towns must choose to allow consumption venues. Then local zoning and health boards will have their say. Only then, once business owners understand how they can operate, will they begin the state licensing process. And that could take years to complete.
“It’s very difficult to find a space if I’m not sure what we’ll be allowed to do,” Kanter said.
Until the regulations are in place, she said many property owners are unwilling to discuss leasing space to a future social consumption business.
“I’ve talked to 50 landlords and 49 of them were like, ‘We’re not touching it,’” Kanter said. And she doesn’t blame them.
A myriad of questions remain for regulators to address, including how business operators will monitor customers to prevent over-serving.
Newton Police Chief John Carmichael Jr., who sits on the commission’s Cannabis Advisory Board, said he believes social consumption businesses can be opened safely, just as other cannabis businesses have been — “as long as they’re following the regulations.”
“It comes down to individual responsibility — the establishment being responsible and the individual being responsible as they come and go,” Carmichael said.
The Summit Lounge “has not been the cause of any major issues,” a Worcester Police Department spokesperson said.
Though no roadside test exists to detect whether a driver is impaired by marijuana, Carmichael said police officers are trained to recognize the signs of a high driver. The arrival of pot lounges will not greatly affect how police operate, he said.
Other questions remain.
If a patron doesn’t finish a pot-infused brownie, for example, could they take it home to finish later?
In the variable New England climate, will smoking or vaping be permitted indoors? As a private club, the Summit Lounge allows smoking. But regular businesses face far stricter rules.
“My concern is they’ll regulate it into an unprofitable state,” Blake Mensing, an attorney who has represented both cannabis companies and municipalities, said.
He and his business partners are now opening Firebrand Cannabis, a dispensary near Boston’s South Station, though Mensing also hopes to one day open a cannabis lounge.
Stebbins believes the state’s cannabis industry is better positioned now to adopt social consumption than it was a year ago.
He points to the removal of the pilot program, the recent introduction of grants to support businesses in the state’s cannabis social equity program, and reforms that reeled in the conditions municipalities can place on cannabis businesses.
But the pace of the commission’s work still confounds business owners like Kanter, who have spent years operating in a legal gray area.
“I just don’t understand what’s taking so long,” she said.
