Maine built one of the most vibrant, patient-driven medical cannabis markets in America. Now a contamination panic, a powerful tracking company and a regulatory crackdown threaten to squeeze it into something else entirely.
There is a farm in Maine where a woman grows cannabis outdoors, off-grid, on land certified organic by the state’s own agricultural authority. She runs a two-person operation. Her plants see the sun. Her records are audited under USDA organic handling standards. She sells directly to patients who know her name. In nearly every meaningful sense, she is doing what the legalization movement promised cannabis could be.
In Augusta, the state capital, there are people who would like to make what she does either illegal or economically impossible. They have a contamination study, a governor who calls the program “the wild, wild West,” a public health coalition of a dozen organizations, and a contract with METRC—the seed-to-sale tracking titan—behind them. They also have a regulator whose professional history runs through the same consulting orbit that helped bring the tracking software to Maine’s adult-use market. The same man who helped shape the adult-use rules that made METRC mandatory now argues it should be imposed on a medical program that has functioned without it for twenty-six years.
Maine has historically been progressive about weed. The state decriminalized possession in 1976. Voters approved medical cannabis by a 61.4% margin in 1999, making Maine the fifth legal medical state. What grew from that was a caregiver program, consisting of small cultivators growing for patients they knew personally, operating under the same kind of trust-based, record-keeping framework you’d find in Maine’s shellfish, dairy or other agricultural industries.
The program expanded through fits and starts. A 2009 ballot initiative established a dispensary framework, initially capped at eight. In 2018, LD 1539 eliminated the list of qualifying conditions entirely—allowing physicians to solely use their professional criteria—and allowing caregivers to open retail storefronts, hire employees, and operate as full commercial businesses. In February 2019, Governor Mills created the Office of Cannabis Policy to “consolidate oversight.” That June, Maine expanded reciprocity to allow visiting patients from other states to purchase simply by showing their home-state credential. The state now accepts medical credentials from 29 states plus Washington, D.C.
Lizzy Hayes is a registered caregiver in this program. She grows exclusively outdoors, off-grid, and her farm holds Clean Cannabis Certification from the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, verifying compliance with USDA organic standards—including seed-to-sale tracking through audited records. She describes the program as one that developed slowly and organically, with tracking done through paper recordkeeping and testing required only to verify claims made on labeling. The regulators, she notes, already have statutory authority to audit-test operators and inspect both facilities and records.
The numbers tell you the market’s own verdict. As of 2025, 112,547 patients were registered—roughly 8% of Maine’s population, one of the highest per-capita rates in the country, nearly tripled from the 41,858 certifications that existed in 2017. The program supports 1,539 caregivers and over 5,000 employees. In 2021, medical cannabis generated $371 million in sales versus just $81 million for adult-use. Even in 2023, medical ($280 million) still outpaced recreational ($217 million). Year after year, Mainers with access to both programs have renewed their medical cards and chosen the caregiver market. OCP Director John Hudak himself admitted surprise, acknowledging that most people assumed medical would have been absorbed by adult-use by now, as has partially happened in many other states.
So, what’s their secret?
Mark Barnett, founder and policy director of the Maine Craft Cannabis Association, operates a combined coffee shop and dispensary in Portland’s Old Port. He frames what Maine has built in terms that should embarrass every other state program in the country.
“We have by far the highest quality regulatory environment for our medical cannabis program, as evidenced by the amazing number of participants, business participants in that program who are two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year or less in total turnover. True craft businesses, true micro businesses, all the things that folks like to point out as what we should be supporting—Maine is already doing it and has been doing it since ’99.”
The smallest registration type allows cultivation of six plants—the most accessible entry point in any legal cannabis program in the country. The largest caregiver canopy caps at 500 square feet. Between those poles, an estimated 237 caregivers operate retail storefronts. According to the OCP’s own 2025 annual report, administrative actions impacted just 1% of all registered caregivers, and the vast majority of violations were resolved through technical assistance rather than fines or revocations. In the language of agricultural regulation, that is a well-functioning program.
In the language of Maine’s current governor, that’s a problem.
Colorado Consultants
When Maine voters approved recreational cannabis in 2016 by a narrow 51% margin, the state hired a consulting group to draft the implementation framework. The group included Andrew Freedman, Colorado’s first cannabis policy director; Lewis Koski, former director of Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division; and John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. During the period Koski was contracted with Maine, he took a position at METRC—the biggest seed-to-sale tracking company in the US—where he now serves as Chief Strategy Officer. METRC’s parent company is Franwell, Inc.
The adult-use program that was then deployed in Maine was heavily inspired by the one in Colorado, requiring METRC tracking and mandatory batch testing—the standard template that has been replicated as states adopt legal cannabis. Maine’s medical program, by contrast, remained a grassroots industry with a low barrier to entry, treated more like other regulated agricultural sectors.
The adult-use rules that emerged included mandatory batch testing across seven analyte categories, and a compliance infrastructure that now costs licensees $40 per month plus RFID tag fees ($0.25 per package, $0.45 per plant), third-party integration software ($100–$500/month), and the less visible costs of dedicated compliance labor and system downtime. The state’s original six-year METRC contract was at that time valued at $540,000. The medical program had none of this. It continued under its trip-ticket, transaction-log, and audit-inspection framework—a system that, as Hayes notes, records the date, time, location, registration numbers, and description of every cannabis transfer, and which she argues is sufficient to conduct a recall.
“To get that passed at the last minute, they added municipal control of licensing. They kind of cracked down or doubled down on the thing that would eventually become METRC—which is the requirement for seed-to-sale tracking, which is kind of the Voldemort of the cannabis industry. No other industry has to deal with anything like that at all,” says Barnett.
And he underlines that the cannabis community was not asked whether it supported those additions. That was a deal made at the last minute. Closed doors. And this then led to the attempt to transpose those same rules onto the medical program that had been working for two decades. Advocates responded by passing LD 1242, a bill that stripped the executive branch’s ability to impose rules on the medical program without originating legislation through the full legislature, with public hearings and elected accountability. The OCP could no longer rewrite the medical program in the dark.
That shield held for years but it’s now being eroded.
The Fox in the Cannabis Office
John Hudak, Ph.D., was appointed director of Maine’s Office of Cannabis Policy in late 2022. He had been one of the founding members of the consulting group—alongside Freedman and Koski—contracted to help draft Maine’s adult-use law and, more critically, the administrative rules that gave it operational shape. Those rules ran to hundreds of pages and included the METRC mandate that the cannabis community had opposed throughout the process.
“Like so much stuff in cannabis, the disaster and the damage isn’t in the statute that enables it. It’s in the rule. And then the executive branch, which gets to enforce the rule and which generally has a much easier time making rules than passing bad statute—that’s where the damage happens because people stop paying attention,” said Barnett.
Hudak’s appointment set off alarms not because of his credentials—he is a published policy scholar with a doctorate—but because of concerns about disclosure, process, and public trust. He had co-founded a consulting venture with Lewis Koski, who went on to become a METRC executive. As OCP director, Hudak then negotiated an expanded contract with METRC valued at $890,000—a significant increase over the original $540,000 deal—without recusing himself. When certain legislation explicitly sought to strip back elements of METRC’s role, the result under Hudak’s leadership was, somehow, a larger METRC contract.
After pressure from lawmakers—notably Rep. David Boyer (R-Poland)—the Maine Government Oversight and Accountability Committee launched an investigation. The findings landed in disputed territory.
“If you look at it and you look at the facts of the case… He helped bring METRC in in the first place—but over the years of his administration, despite the legislature and the public clearly trying to remove METRC from our program, he’s re-signed them, expanded the contracts with them, given them more of our taxpayer money,” explains Barnett.
The OPEGA report reviewed the concern raised by Boyer regarding the appearance of a conflict of interest between Hudak and METRC. OPEGA found that Hudak did not have ownership or equity in Freedman & Koski, found no evidence that Lewis Koski was involved in the METRC contract amendment negotiations, and concluded that the facts did not support a conclusion that disclosure or abstention was required by statute in relation to the amendment. OPEGA did, however, recommend that DAFS adopt more formal guidance and documentation procedures for conflicts of interest in procurement. Alexis Soucy, OCP’s Director of Media and Stakeholder Relations, told High Times that the Government Oversight Committee voted unanimously on November 19, 2025 to accept those findings.
Hudak was not formally charged with violating the state’s corruption statute. Whether the OPEGA investigation constitutes vindication or a soft landing depends on who you ask. What is not in dispute is the timeline: Hudak co-founded a firm with the man who became METRC’s Chief Strategy Officer, then as regulator expanded that company’s contract by 65% without recusal, in a process that generated enough concern for legislators to request a formal oversight review.
Meanwhile, METRC itself is under separate scrutiny. In April 2025, former METRC executive Marcus Estes filed a whistleblower lawsuit in Oregon federal court alleging the company knowingly ignored compliance violations in California that facilitated cannabis diversion—the very problem seed-to-sale tracking is supposed to prevent. The Oregon case was dismissed in June 2025, but not on the merits: Judge Karin Immergut ruled that because the same claims were being litigated in a separate Florida case, dismissal rather than transfer was appropriate, reported MJBizDaily. As of June 2025, the Florida case remained ongoing after mediation failed.
In August 2025, METRC announced a partnership with its primary competitor, BioTrack, a move that critics say further consolidated the regulatory technology market. METRC disputes the monopoly label, noting that each contract is the result of state-level competitive procurement.
So, based on the available information, someone could reasonably connect the dots as follows: a regulator whose prior professional relationships raised conflict concerns, overseeing a contract he expanded over legislative objections, pushing to impose that same system on a program that has functioned without it for a quarter-century—while the company itself faces federal allegations that its system failed to prevent the very kind of diversion it is supposed to track.
The 42% Headline
In November 2023, the OCP released the study that reshaped the political terrain. Director Hudak had dispatched field investigators to collect 120 samples from medical cannabis sellers. Apparently, 42% contained at least one contaminant that would have failed adult-use testing thresholds. The headline almost wrote itself. Hudak even went all the way with a Press Release that unequivocally reads: “This data indicate that Maine’s medical cannabis program needs a comprehensive solution to reform and modernize the system in order to protect Maine’s patients.”
Flower failed at an even higher rate of 44.6%. The most alarming finding involved myclobutanil at 58,600 parts per billion—293 times the adult-use threshold. Myclobutanil releases hydrogen cyanide gas when combusted. Investigators also found 26 samples failing for pesticides across 11 different compounds, 4 for heavy metals including arsenic, cadmium, and lead, and 30 for yeast and mold.
The study gave Governor Janet Mills the ammunition for her January 2025 budget address, where she declared the state could no longer “encourage the wild, wild West of medical cannabis.” It armed the Alliance for Responsible Cannabis in Maine—a coalition of bipartisan lawmakers and roughly 12 public health organizations including the Maine Medical Association, Maine Osteopathic Association, and Maine Public Health Association—with the language of patient safety. Matt Wellington of the Maine Public Health Association framed Maine as “the only state out of more than 30 states with medical cannabis programs that does not require and enforce testing.”
The study was a silver bullet, as nobody can dismiss myclobutanil at 293 times the threshold. But the operators who live inside the program saw something specific in the study’s construction. One hundred and twenty samples were collected from a program with more than 1,800 registrants. The results were aggregated across categories with wildly different risk profiles. Barnett argues the framing was designed to produce a headline.
“What they did was they essentially misrepresented the results of what they had done without doing it on the adult-use program. And the vast majority of them were total yeast and mold,” a biologically occurring phenomenon, particularly among flowers that might be showcased on shelves for a couple of weeks.
Grouping that alongside cyanide-producing pesticides without disaggregating the results by category is a framing choice to serve a policy agenda. Moreover, the study was never replicated on the adult-use side, despite the fact that Maine’s own adult-use market had its own contamination scandal: in October 2025, thousands of Yani vape cartridges were found tainted on retail shelves—in the program with METRC and mandatory batch testing. It was a consumer complaint that caught the problem.
Then, in January 2026, the OCP issued its first-ever Medical Cannabis Patient Advisory, for MarijuanaVille dispensary in Waterville—five strains of cannabis concentrates contained unsafe levels of eight different pesticides, including bifenthrin at more than 190 times the acceptable level. The OCP explicitly stated it could only issue an advisory, not a mandatory recall, and that “limited inventory recordkeeping requirements in the medical program hinder OCP’s ability to identify sources of contamination.”
This is where the argument scrambles—and where the two sides diverge on the basic facts. Hayes and medical program advocates maintain that audit testing is already written into the program rules, and that the OCP has simply declined to implement it for eight-plus years. OCP disputes this. Soucy told High Times that the claim is “simply incorrect,” arguing that the original statutory authority for testing provisions (22 MRS § 2430-A) was repealed in December 2018, and that current inspection authority under § 2430-K is not the same thing.
“The medical program statute does not specify the requirements necessary for the Office to implement a mandatory contaminant testing program,” Soucy said. “Absent statutory changes specifying that certain levels of certain substances are harmful contaminants that should not be in cannabis, OCP is limited in what it can do with any audit test results.”
Yet the OCP itself conducted the 2023 study using precisely the audit-testing methodology that operators have been requesting—pulling samples from shelves, sending them to labs, publishing the results. Soucy acknowledged as much, stating that “OCP conducted audit testing and generated the report to bring data to the open question of whether the medical cannabis supply chain was contaminated.”
The question that follows is: if the office has the capacity to audit-test when it wants to build a case for new regulation, why was that same capacity never operationalized as an ongoing patient safety program?
Their Way or The Highway
A full-panel test in Maine runs approximately $500. A mid-sized caregiver growing 37 varieties—not unusual in a craft market built on genetic diversity—faces testing costs alone approaching $25,000 per year. Add the $40 monthly METRC fee, RFID tags for every plant and package, integration software, and the data-entry labor required on a two-person farm, and the compliance cost on a business doing $200,000 in annual sales becomes unbearable.
So basically compliance costs will make the minimum capital required to operate surge dramatically.
The Paul McCarrier testimony before the VLA Committee estimated total annual METRC and testing compliance costs for a mid-sized operation at $119,440 to $187,440. These figures were not confirmed or disputed by METRC on the record.
That’s likely why Hayes thinks that “these regulations will result in an enormous loss of product diversity. Right now, if you have patients who want a specific plant, one that is less commercially viable, we are able to still produce that for them. But if a single plant grown for that patient now can’t be transferred without a $500 testing bill, it just becomes impossible to maintain that type of personalized medicine.”
Or, just as likely, current and new operators will divert their production into the illicit market, therefore damaging the whole legal cannabis ecosystem in the state.
What a spokesperson did tell High Times was that “While track-and-trace technology alone cannot fully prevent diversion or contamination, systems like METRC are designed to create accountability by helping regulators identify irregularities, facilitate recalls, verify testing compliance, and investigate illegal activity within licensed markets.”
While METRC alarms have triggered numerous busts and recalls in different states, another reality check is that no agricultural industry in America—not alcohol, not dairy, not tobacco—operates under comparable real-time surveillance requirements. Even pharmaceutical serialization under the federal Drug Supply Chain Security Act, the closest analogue, applies only to finished products.
The Surveillance Infrastructure Nobody Is Discussing
There is an entire dimension of the METRC debate that almost never surfaces in legislative hearings or press coverage, and it has to do with the data.
METRC is not only a compliance tool but also a surveillance infrastructure that warehouses granular, monetizable consumer behavior data—purchase patterns, product preferences, consumption frequency, medical conditions by inference—with a dominant provider that operates across numerous jurisdictions and serves hundreds of thousands of users and tens of thousands of licensed operators.
Barnett raises a question that should concern every cannabis consumer in America, not just Maine’s caregivers.
“We’re talking about monetizable consumer behavior being warehoused … and has, to my knowledge, almost no regulation of how it handles that data. In an age where we’re seeing state and federal governments abuse Americans’ consumer data like never before, how can we justify such invasive data harvesting with no safety guardrails? When will we see the Trump administration start using METRC data to target non-citizens for deportations?”
ICE already uses commercial databases, utility records, and DMV data for enforcement operations. Cannabis purchase data—linked to individual identities through state-mandated tracking—would be an intelligence asset of obvious value to an administration that has made interior enforcement a public banner.
Every METRC transaction creates a record that ties a named individual to a federally illegal substance. The system that is sold as consumer protection is, simultaneously, a federally accessible record of participation in a Schedule I market.
METRC stated that “there have been no reported issues related to data privacy, retention, sharing, or law enforcement access” and that the company operates under strict contractual requirements set by each state regulator.
The National Record: What METRC Delivered
If the track record in other states vindicated METRC, the argument for imposing it on Maine would be considerably stronger. It does not.
California deployed METRC statewide. Active cultivation licenses dropped 43% between 2021 and 2024—from 8,493 to 4,805. Despite METRC, an estimated 60% of cannabis consumed in California still comes from the unregulated market—approximately 11.4 million pounds of illicit production versus 1.43 million through legal channels. Eradication efforts accounted for an estimated $544 million worth of unlicensed cannabis seized, capturing roughly 5% of annual illicit output by value.
Oklahoma implemented METRC in May 2022 after fierce resistance, including operator lawsuits and a temporary restraining order. Active licenses fell 27% within one year. A moratorium on new licenses followed. Colorado—where METRC was born in 2011—passed legislation in 2024 eliminating its RFID tag requirement effective January 2027. The state’s METRC contract expires in 2026, and industry observers report METRC is not assured of renewal. Colorado is now considering moving to the audit-testing model that Maine’s medical operators have been requesting for years.
A 2023 MJBizDaily investigation found that cannabis operators nationally report track-and-trace expenditures offering minimal return, with hidden costs—integration software, compliance staff, error correction, system downtime—compounding far beyond visible fees. In that report, the system appears to be widely questioned by cannabis operators that already operate under this standard. Looking at the stats, its “value proposition”—preventing cannabis from leaking in or out of legal markets—is at least dubious.
The Floor Fight Ahead
Two bills defined the 2025 legislative session on this issue. LD 104, introduced at OCP’s request, would have imposed testing and tracking on the medical program. The Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee killed it in May. LD 1847, sponsored by Rep. Anne Graham (D-North Yarmouth), survived. It mandates testing for potency, mold, arsenic, lead, and PFAS; requires seed-to-sale tracking mirroring the adult-use system; establishes THC potency caps on medical edibles; and includes an exemption for growers under 30 plants—though their products must carry an “untested” label.
LD 1847 was carried over to the 2026 session and is now in VLA Committee work sessions, with competing amendments circulating and a committee vote expected in the coming weeks.
The advocacy community, which defeated similar bills in 2018, 2021, 2023, and 2025, is not unified on tactics. Some operators with dual medical and adult-use licenses see a version of testing as survivable. Others view any mandate beyond the audit model as the beginning of the end.
The medical community’s counter-proposals consist of annual inspections of all operators (the OCP does not currently inspect everyone annually), increased recordkeeping requirements sufficient to demonstrate recall ability, and audit testing—the model where the regulator pulls products from shelves rather than requiring every grower to pay for pre-sale batch testing. VLA Committee Chair Sen. Craig Hickman (D-Winthrop), himself an organic farmer, proposed a version of this model.
In the next few weeks, the VLA Committee will vote LD 1847 out for floor debate.
The craft cannabis community is organizing mass action against what it calls the continued assault on the program. The OCP’s METRC contract is expiring. And 112,547 patients are stakeholders on whether the best grassroots market, and last cannabis garden in America will be chopped down into an enclosing regulatory corset, or pushed into illicit activities again.
Until then, Maine’s garden is still growing. For now.
Editor’s note: This article contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information and is not intended to assert undisclosed facts. This story includes responses from Maine’s Office of Cannabis Policy and METRC. Allegations described in cited whistleblower litigation remain allegations unless and until proven in court. Readers are encouraged to review the underlying materials and draw their own conclusions.
