GBH Daily: The underground weed market today

☀️A sunny and cool Veterans Day, with highs in the 50s. Sunset is at 4:25 p.m.

As we continue to explore what the Massachusetts cannabis market looks like 10 years after legalization, GBH reporter Trajan Warren looked at a less-explored question: what happened to the underground market? About 61% of people who have used cannabis told state researchers they got their weed from a dispensary, while the rest reported growing their own, getting it from a friend or buying it from a dealer.

Warren talked to a former distributor who said the underground business stopped making financial sense after legalization: “It’s just penny pinching. A six-hour flight there, six-hour flight back, pay for a rental vehicle, pay for people to come back and forth with me. For what? To make $200 on a unit. It’s just not worth it for me anymore,” he said. “It’s a sad market now.”

But the market is still there, said Jordan MacKenzie Whittaker of the Weedaker Group: “There’s still folks that don’t have licenses that are cultivators, manufacturers, chefs, researchers you name it,” she said. “It’s where we got started.” You can read Warren’s full story on the underground cannabis market here. And thank you to everyone who has written in with their thoughts on the Massachusetts cannabis market. If you have not yet shared your thoughts (or have a pre-legalization story to share) reply to this email or drop us a line at daily@wgbh.org.

Four Things to Know

1. Matthew Farwell found guilty: A jury found former Stoughton police officer Matthew Farwell guilty of murdering Sandra Birchmore in 2021 to prevent her from revealing that he had sexually abused her when she was 15. Birchmore was 23 and pregnant when Farwell killed her in her apartment and made her death look like a suicide.

Farwell now faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison. He is no longer allowed to work as a police officer in Massachusetts. Neither are two other former Stoughton Police officers accused of having inappropriate relationships with Birchmore: Farwell’s twin brother, William Farwell, and Stoughton Deputy Police Chief Robert Devine. 

2. ICE uses Fenway footage: The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s official social media account used footage of a mostly white crowd in Fenway Park from the mid-20th century in a video that ends with the message “America for Americans.”

A Red Sox spokesperson had no comment about ICE’s use of the footage. Boston College Prof. Michael Serazio, who studies political communication, said the footage and tagline are “pretty unsubtle in terms of the messaging around who belongs in the United States and, by extension, who doesn’t,” he said. “And the demographics that they chose to illustrate that in that clip are also pretty unsubtle as well.”

3. Undeliverable in Roxbury: A group of Roxbury residents sent an open letter to the U.S. Postal Service saying mail delivery in their neighborhood is unreliable because of high turnover and low staffing at their local post office.

“It’s dismal,” said Boston City Councilor Miniard Culpepper, who represents Roxbury. “It’s not consistent. You get mail sometimes. Sometimes you have long periods where you don’t get mail.”

4. Veterans Day: Andrew Coville grew up on Cape Cod and enlisted in the Marines while he was still in high school, getting his parents’ permission to sign up. He served from 2006 to 2010, deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It took me years to realize this, but people want to understand. You just have to give them the ability to try,” he told Jared Bowen on GBH’s The Culture Show. “A lot of veterans will make this almost self-imposed isolation because they say no one understands, but they also don’t try to give them the chance to. And it took me a while to get to that point.” You can hear their whole conversation here.

Mitt and Ted: Are the 2020s just a repeat of the 2000s?

By Ian Coss, host of the podcasts The Big Dig and Mitt and Ted: A Healthcare Story 

Still reeling from those election results in the U.S. Senate? Then you might be interested in a look back at the last time Democrats held such a large majority in Congress and what happened to it.

In the final episode of Mitt & Ted: A Healthcare Story (out today!), we finally arrive at the passage of The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. We also arrive at the backlash that accompanied it, including here in Massachusetts. I’m talking, of course, about the 2010 special election between Martha Coakley and Scott Brown.

It’s been interesting this season in particular to revisit events that I actually remember. For context, Romneycare passed in 2006, the year I graduated from high school. The Obama-McCain race in 2008 was the first presidential election in which I could vote. The ACA affected me personally. I was one of those people under age 26 whom the law allowed to remain on their parents’ health insurance.
And I distinctly remember that in December 2009, my girlfriend’s grandmother, who was very political and knew I was from Massachusetts, was bugging me to get out and vote in the upcoming special election to replace Ted Kennedy. She understood what I didn’t: that this one Senate election in the dead of winter could decide the fate of the most consequential bill in a generation. So make your voice heard.

I don’t mention this in the podcast, but I’ll make the confession here: I did not get out and vote in that special election.

So yeah, I remember this one for sure. But it was so fascinating to interview Scott Brown’s campaign manager, Beth Lindstrom, who shared with me a whole collection of mailers and news clippings she kept from that time. In some ways, that big blue wave of the 2000s began its retreat with the upstart campaign of Scott Brown, complete with his barn jacket and green pickup truck. And I promise you: whatever you remember from that time, what was going on inside the campaign was way crazier than we knew.
What happened in 2009 and 2010 is, in some ways, a cautionary tale about how quickly political winds can shift and how unrelated events, like a financial crisis or a malignant brain tumor, can change the course of history.

I don’t like to make predictions, but so far the parallels between the 2000s and 2020s are kind of eerie. An unpopular war in the Middle East, led by an unpopular lame-duck president. Big Democratic gains in the mid-terms…

And if that parallel journey continues, then the conversation around healthcare reform might just come back around in the next few years. The question is, will that reform be a uniting event or a divisive one? Will it generate goodwill, or will it prompt a backlash? I’ll be watching with great interest.

Catch up: Mitt & Ted, a Healthcare Story | The Big Dig Season 4

Join us live: Can Massachusetts make history in healthcare again? A debate