The first NECANN show should have been a disaster. February in Boston. Seven feet of snow. A venue with frozen steps. A Patriots Super Bowl scheduling scramble. Marc Shepard was outside at 5 a.m., smashing ice off the entrance to a beer hall and wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into.
Then the doors opened.
By 9 a.m., there was a line around the corner. NECANN had to stop selling tickets at the door both days because the response was too big for the room. This was 2015, before adult-use cannabis was legal in Massachusetts and before most East Coast operators had anything resembling an industry to stand on.
I just sort of remember going into the owner of where I worked the next day, and he was sort of my partner in that launch, and I was like, good news, bad news, you saw the event. Good news, I think we’ve got something really good here. Very exciting. Bad news, I’m retiring from the newspaper industry. I’m going to do this. – Marc Shepard
A decade later, Shepard is co-founder and president of NECANN, short for New England Cannabis Conventions, one of the East Coast’s most recognizable cannabis event platforms. The company’s official site says NECANN has been developing cannabis conventions since 2014 with an intentionally local-market approach, including a commitment to donating 10% of exhibit hall space to social equity licensees and advocacy groups.
That local-first philosophy is not just branding. For Shepard, it is the whole damn machine.
From Alt-Weeklies to Weed Weeklies
Before cannabis conventions, Shepard lived in the scrappy, ink-stained world of alternative newspapers. He came up in the orbit of papers like the Boston Phoenix and Providence Phoenix, the kind of progressive alt-weeklies that treated culture, politics, civil rights, and drug policy as connected fights rather than separate beats.
“I eventually found my way into the alternative newspaper business. Sort of the newspaper version of High Times, if you will, that sort of counterculture, but journalism focused,” Shepard said.
That world trained him for cannabis before cannabis was ready to call itself an industry. Shepard spent more than 15 years in advocacy journalism, where legalization and normalization were not content verticals. They were part of the mission.
Then the internet did what the internet did. The print started bleeding. Events became a lifeline. Beer festivals, concerts, ticketed gatherings. If a paper had readers, venue relationships, and advertisers, events were a natural next play.
In 2014, Shepard was the publisher at Dig Boston when the idea surfaced: Could they do a cannabis event in Massachusetts?
Medical cannabis was legal in the state, but adult-use was still on the horizon. Shepard says people were still getting raided or busted for selling CBD products. Nobody knew exactly what a cannabis event could legally or practically look like.
The first NECANN was purely educational. No real business yet. No polished East Coast cannabis economy. Just people hungry for information, access, and a room full of others who were done pretending weed was fringe.
That room changed Shepard’s life.
The Case for Staying Local
Cannabis events exploded between 2014 and 2017. Shepard is not precious about it. He does not pretend NECANN cracked some mystical code while everyone else was asleep at the wheel.
“Pretty much anyone who launched a cannabis B2B event from 2014 to say 2016 or 17 was successful,” Shepard said. “It was just, hey, congrats to us for having the timing.”
The harder part came later.
Cannabis trade shows are not like golf conventions or food expos. Shepard makes the comparison plainly: in mature industries, the major manufacturers are known, stable, and likely to renew year after year. Cannabis is different. Operators disappear, merge, pivot, get buried by taxes, lose funding, or get kneecapped by local rules.
“In the cannabis industry, they go out of business or fold or change, not by the day, by the hour,” Shepard said.
That volatility shapes everything. NECANN cannot simply build a show around last year’s exhibitor list and expect the same companies to come back with bigger checks. Shepard says the business requires constant outreach to new operators, new sponsors, and new local players.
His solution has been accessibility. Smaller booths. Lower barriers. Fewer whale sponsors calling the shots. More entrepreneurs and local operators in the room.
“I would rather have a hundred $1000 advert exhibitors than four $25,000 sponsors because if one of them becomes unreasonable, I have to plate them because they’re 25% of my business,” Shepard said. “Now, it doesn’t really come up, but the way our business is built, if someone becomes unreasonable and we can’t do business with them, we can walk away because they’re 1% of our business.”
The Massachusetts Fight Is Back on the Table
NECANN’s Boston show has always carried extra weight. It is the home market, the origin story, and one of the main annual gathering points for the Northeast cannabis industry.
This year, Shepard says Boston felt especially urgent because Massachusetts is facing a potential adult-use rollback effort. GBH reported in January 2026 that the State Ballot Law Commission dismissed an objection to a proposed measure that would give voters a chance to repeal recreational marijuana legalization. Ballotpedia describes the 2026 initiative as one that would repeal laws permitting adult-use marijuana sales while allowing limited possession, and Marijuana Moment reported in May 2026 that lawmakers declined to act on the proposal, leaving activists to gather the additional signatures needed for the November ballot.
Shepard is not treating it like background noise.
“There is literally a prohibition question on the ballot, and if the people in the industry and the people that support cannabis don’t come out and vote, we could be faced with cannabis being outlawed again in Massachusetts after November,” Shepard said.
He framed NECANN Boston as more than a networking event. According to Shepard, the team put at least one session on every programming track addressing the issue, with an emphasis on practical action rather than vague hand-wringing.
“So, we were conscious of putting at least one session on every programming track addressing that question with actionable items about who is depending on what actions you can actually take between now and November to help this happen,” Shepard said.
For Shepard, there is a bitter symmetry to it. NECANN’s earliest Boston events were about pushing people to vote for legalization. Ten years later, the room is being asked to defend what voters already won.
“It’s a little disheartening and sad,” Shepard said, “but also just nice to know that we have that platform and our voice is that much louder 10 years later, and we were able to give a stage and a microphone to the people that are doing the work to get it done.”
Why the Northeast Became the Room Everyone Wants In
NECANN may have New England in the name, but Shepard says the Boston event has functioned as a broader Northeast gathering for years, pulling from New York, New Jersey, Maine, Vermont, and beyond.
That regional identity has only gotten stronger as mature Western markets tighten and companies look east for growth.
Shepard says NECANN responded by paying speakers and introducing free admission for buyers. Both moves are small rebellions against standard trade-show economics, where speakers are often expected to donate expertise for “exposure” while attendees with purchasing power are charged for the privilege of being sold to.
“Coming from journalism, I just never really liked that model that speakers speak for free, but I’m like that’s what the industry does, and I’m like so that’s the business model, and I finally just was like I don’t care that that’s the business model. It’s not right,” Shepard said.
He believes paying speakers improved the quality of the programming and made contributors take the work seriously. Free buyer admission, meanwhile, helped get owners and purchasing decision-makers onto the floor.
NECANN also made another quietly smart choice: it stopped treating surrounding events like competition.
“I don’t care. Everyone in the industry is here. No single venue can hold everybody,” Shepard said. “So if eight different things are going on, it’s better for the attendees. It’s better for the industry.”
That is a mature-market mindset from an industry that still has plenty of toddler tantrums left in it. Shepard’s view is that a busy week full of panels, parties, mixers, and independent gatherings makes the whole market look bigger, more professional, and harder to ignore.
Minnesota Gets the NECANN Treatment
After Pennsylvania, Boston, and Vermont, NECANN headed to Minnesota in May 2026. The official NECANN schedule listed the Minnesota Cannabis Convention for May 14–15, 2026, at the Minneapolis Convention Center.
Shepard says the company spent roughly a year and a half introducing itself to Minnesota before asking the market to show up. That meant sponsoring existing events, joining organizations, promoting other people’s work, and contributing before extracting.
“But our model instead was to spend about a year and a half introducing ourselves to the Minnesota market,” Shepard said. “We sponsored all the existing events there, supported the people that built the Minnesota market and paid into their efforts and bought sponsorships from them and came to their events and promoted their events and joined and spent a year in membership with organizations out there contributing rather than asking.”
That is the thesis of NECANN in one sentence: show up before you sell.
For Minnesota, Shepard said the programming involved local organizations, the Minority Cannabis Business Association, social equity opportunities, Minnesota-based exhibitors, and tribal license holders. NECANN’s official “About Us” page also says the company commits to donating 10% of exhibit hall space to social equity licensees and advocacy groups.
Shepard said Minnesota went even further.
“We made at least 10% of the exhibit hall floor available to be donated to social equity license holders or applicants,” Shepard said. “I think we ended up at about 15% of the floor will be taken by social equity, and that includes the tribal license holders in Minnesota.”
That matters because cannabis events can easily become pay-to-play rooms where the people most impacted by prohibition are priced out of the so-called opportunity economy. Donated space does not solve the structural mess by itself, but it does at least acknowledge who should be in the room.
The Trade Show as Political Infrastructure
It is easy to make fun of cannabis conferences. The lanyards. The branded tote bags. The panel titles that sound like they were written by a LinkedIn algorithm with a dab cough.
But Shepard’s story is a reminder that rooms matter.
Before there were mature markets, there were rooms. Before investors, there were rooms. Before regulators fully understood what they were regulating, there were rooms full of patients, growers, lawyers, activists, operators, journalists, and weirdos with business cards trying to make something real.
NECANN survived because it understood that cannabis is not one national market. It is a patchwork of state laws, local grudges, weather patterns, legacy networks, licensing fights, cultural codes, and political ambushes. What works in Humboldt does not automatically work in Maine. What sells in Colorado may mean nothing in Minnesota. What looks safe in Massachusetts can be back on the chopping block a decade later.
Shepard seems most comfortable in that tension. He is an event guy, yes. But he is also still an alt-weekly guy at heart: suspicious of power, loyal to local scenes, and allergic to polished bullshit.
The cannabis industry loves to talk about community when it needs something. Shepard’s model asks a better question: Did you build anything for the community before you passed the invoice?
Reflections
Marc Shepard did not build NECANN by pretending cannabis was clean, stable, or easy. He built it around the opposite truth: this industry is volatile, hyperlocal, politically exposed, and full of people trying to stay alive long enough to matter.
That is why the first frozen Boston show still feels like the right origin story. A bad-weather mess. A room nobody was sure would fill. A line around the block anyway.
Ten years later, the stakes are bigger, the rooms are cleaner, and the badges are probably better printed. But the job is still the same: get the people together, hand the microphone to the ones doing the work, and remind everyone that legalization is not a trophy on the shelf. It is a fight that can come back around when the room gets too comfortable.
Photos courtesy of NECANN
