The Northeast’s Illicit Cannabis Market Is Shrinking. Massachusetts Just Published the Most Detailed Evidence Yet.

Eight years ago, Massachusetts voters approved Question 4 and handed regulators the unenviable task of competing with a black market that had a multi-decade head start, zero compliance overhead, and no sales tax. Most people in the industry quietly assumed it would take a generation to displace it.

The data now says they were wrong — and the margin isn’t close.

The Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission released a new research report this month showing that 73 percent of cannabis consumers in the state purchased their product at a licensed store in 2023, up from roughly 61 percent averaged across the 2019–2023 survey period. The Commission drew on five years of data from the International Cannabis Policy Study, a population survey covering more than 11,000 Massachusetts residents ages 16 to 65 — the most detailed longitudinal dataset on consumer sourcing behavior any state in the Northeast has yet produced.

“Residents turn away from the illicit market when safe, well-regulated options are available,” said Travis Ahern, the Commission’s Executive Director.

The timing is notable. The Massachusetts report arrived just days after a separate study — published in the International Journal of Drug Policy by researchers at Columbia University and New York University — found that adult-use legalization is associated with a 45 percent relative reduction in state law enforcement cannabis seizures. That’s not anecdotal. That’s a systematic analysis of seizure data from 2010 to 2023 across all states that adopted recreational cannabis laws.

Taken together, the two datasets tell a story the cannabis industry has been waiting years to tell credibly: regulation works on the black market, and the Northeast is proving it.

Why Massachusetts Got Here Before Everyone Else

The state hit $9 billion in cumulative adult-use sales earlier this year — a milestone that still gets less coverage than it deserves in a region where New York’s stumbling rollout tends to dominate the headlines. But the revenue figure matters less than what it represents in market structure: Massachusetts now has enough licensed retail density, enough consumer trust, and enough price competitiveness that the unlicensed operator is no longer the obvious choice.

That didn’t happen automatically. The Commission reports that the average age of first cannabis use ticked up from 18.5 to 19.9 between 2019 and 2023 — suggesting that legal market controls on youth access are functioning as designed. Use frequency among 16-to-20-year-olds actually dropped over the same period. These are the metrics that skeptics said legalization would destroy.

The Columbia/NYU researchers found that states with both medical and adult-use laws saw the largest suppression of illegal market activity. Massachusetts, which has had both since 2018, fits that profile precisely.

The Northeast Needs to Read This Carefully

For every state in the Northeast that is still watching New York’s labored rollout and wondering whether legalization actually works, Massachusetts is now the counter-argument — documented, peer-reviewed, and updated annually.

New York has 582 licensed adult-use dispensaries as of early 2026, generating over $2.5 billion in total sales since its chaotic 2022 launch. That sounds impressive until you remember that New York’s unlicensed market was estimated to be generating comparable revenue well into 2024. The OCM’s regulatory instability — licensing injunctions, vague compliance rules, a equity licensing delays process that repeatedly stalled — gave the black market years of runway it should never have had.

Connecticut, Rhode Island, and the New England states that legalized more recently are watching both trajectories. The lesson from Massachusetts is relatively straightforward: the legal market wins when it shows up consistently, with enough storefronts, at prices that don’t insult the consumer. The lesson from New York’s early years is the inverse: regulatory chaos is a gift to unlicensed operators.

New Jersey has been navigating its own market maturation since launching adult-use sales in April 2022. The state has added licensed dispensaries steadily, but enforcement against unlicensed shops — particularly in North Jersey and Hudson County — has remained a persistent issue. Massachusetts-style consumer survey data doesn’t exist yet for New Jersey, but the structural conditions are converging.

What the National Picture Actually Shows

The Columbia/NYU finding — a 45 percent drop in seizures — maps to something the industry has long argued but struggled to prove: that legal sales don’t just generate tax revenue, they actively pull volume out of unregulated channels. Canada, which legalized nationally in 2018, has seen nearly 80 percent of consumers migrate to licensed retail. The U.S. is getting there more slowly, in part because a patchwork of state laws means the illicit market can cross jurisdictions in ways it cannot in Canada.

The NORML summary of the study noted: “Findings showed a 45 percent relative reduction in mean counts of state law enforcement cannabis seizures in states that adopted RCL [recreational cannabis laws] in addition to MCL [medical cannabis laws], even after controlling for secular trends and pre-existing state differences.”

That’s a rigorous methodology, not advocacy math.

The Implication Nobody Is Saying Out Loud

There’s a political case embedded in this data that has nothing to do with cannabis policy per se. Illegal market suppression is one of the most durable arguments for legalization in politically mixed states — it speaks directly to law enforcement priorities, public safety concerns, and municipal budget pressures. Massachusetts is now sitting on five years of evidence that the argument is real.

For the holdouts — and there are still a handful in New England, including New Hampshire, where recreational legalization has passed the House multiple times only to stall in the Cannabis Inquirer’s legislative tracker — that data is increasingly hard to ignore.

The illicit market isn’t dead in the Northeast. But it’s measurably smaller, and the states that built functioning legal markets are the reason why.

Dana Reeves covers cannabis policy and markets across the Northeast for CannabisInquirer.com. She is based in New York City.

🚩 NATIONAL FLAG — For ethan_vale or maya_torres: The Columbia University / NYU study (International Journal of Drug Policy) showing a 45% reduction in law enforcement seizures under adult-use legalization is a national policy story. The Massachusetts consumer sourcing data also has national context (Canada comparison, 52% US average vs. 73% in MA). Recommend a companion national piece focused on the research itself and its implications for the DEA rescheduling/federal policy debate.