The Campaign Elevated a Divisive and Hostile Activist to Statewide Prominence Despite Forewarning - A New BSNM, an Alleged Impersonation, a Stubborn Mistrust, a Contradiction, and a "Bang-up Job"

The list of problems with the Question 4 campaign is long, and this postmortem will examine the major issues in depth one by one.

Part 1 (released on October 17, 2025) analyzes the decision to run a policy out of touch with public opinion as indicated by polling, against the recommendations of the Massachusetts ACLU and Dewey Square Group strategists hired by the campaign.

Part 2, initially released in installments as Part 2.1, Part 2.2, and Part 2.3 (on October 21, October 31, and November 6, 2025), analyzes the campaign’s costly handling of a polarizing psychedelics activist and underground practitioner.

Part 3 (released on November 8, 2025), analyzes the campaign’s decision to divert resources to a new nonprofit, co-founded by a close associate of Yes on 4’s campaign director, while polling behind.

WHY THE CAMPAIGN FELL SHORT

2. The Campaign Elevated a Divisive and Hostile Activist to Statewide Prominence Despite Forewarning

2.3 A New Bay Staters for Natural Medicine, an Alleged Impersonation, a Persistent Mistrust, a Contradictory Containment Strategy, and “a Bang-up Job”

A New Bay Staters for Natural Medicine

As described by longtime Drug Policy Alliance staff member and Open Circle Alliance cofounder Stefanie Jones during a recorded panel in December 2024 (complete, rough AI transcript here), the genesis of the nonprofit Open Circle Alliance was a conversation with campaign official Jared Moffat in “early 2024” about “how [the campaign] was going” and the “need” to bring the Massachusetts psychedelics community together.

This aligns with my understanding of Open Circle Alliance, informed by contemporaneous communications with Moffat, as intended to be a replacement for Bay Staters for Natural Medicine as a response to James Davis’s divisive leadership.

I first got wind of the plan for a new nonprofit on February 20, 2024, during a text conversation with Moffat. I informed Moffat “I was looking to get a better sense of the prospects of me formally joining the campaign,” and he replied, “I’m pretty hopeful but what we’re cooking up is a little separate from the actual campaign. Let’s talk tomorrow. Want to describe the idea, get your input, and hear your pitch on why you’re an asset!”

As planned, we spoke the next day. During our call, Moffat told me he had come up with the idea of launching a nonprofit alongside the official campaign. As he described it to me, the intention was for the nonprofit to assume the position of grassroots leadership previously held by Bay Staters for Natural Medicine, providing public education complementary to the ballot question and being a standard bearer for grassroots advocacy that would outlive the campaign. He said his hope was that the organization would steward the Massachusetts psychedelics community in a helpful manner so that, post-election victory, there would be a strong voice to guide policy once the ballot committee dissolved. Moffat said if the model was effective in Massachusetts, it could be adopted in other states. He pitched me on joining this new nonprofit as staff, emphasizing the benefit of joining an organization that could continue indefinitely.

I responded positively to Moffat, although I still preferred to work for the ballot committee, where I thought I could make the greatest positive impact. Immediately after our call, I texted Moffat: “Thank you so much for your amazing work and coming up with this innovative model” (referring to the campaign plus supportive nonprofit co-launch model). Moffat replied he was “excited to put all this into motion.” As later corroborated by Jones in an email, “The idea and funding for a community org originated in collaboration with New Approach.” Open Circle Alliance was formally incorporated on April 19, 2024.

While Open Circle Alliance is the main subject of Part 3 of this postmortem, I mention it succinctly here because, in my understanding, the polarizing behavior of Davis’s Bay Staters for Natural Medicine, exacerbated by the campaign’s long courtship and soft gloves treatment of Davis, was a prime justification for the over $130,000 of spending in relation to Open Circle Alliance. Of that sum, $120,123.69 was paid by veterans advocacy organization Heroic Hearts Project. For context, Heroic Hearts Project claims $6000 is the cost of sponsoring a veteran to access its psychedelic therapy program.

According to public financial disclosures, $112,000 of the Open Circle Alliance-related spending went to salaries for two non-veteran board members ($56,000 each), including Jones, a close associate of Moffat. $8,123.69 was paid to a non-veteran board member as “expense reimbursement.” As of March 31, 2025, Open Circle Alliance had spent just $4,581 on “Program services and similar amounts” since its formal incorporation and had not applied for IRS tax exempt status. To my knowledge as of writing, over its entire history, Open Circle Alliance has made only two social media posts, netted only 50 social media followers, solely organized just four small public events, and has not held an event since February 2025.

As confirmed by The Boston Globe, Heroic Hearts Project spent over $300,000 on television advertising educating Massachusetts residents about natural psychedelics ahead of the 2024 election. I am confident in my assessment that Yes on 4 would have been better served by Heroic Hearts Project spending an additional $120,000 of Massachusetts advocacy spending on advertising rather than on supporting Open Circle Alliance, given the nonprofit’s paucity of activity.

An Alleged Impersonation

On May 16, 2024, during a casual conversation with Jack Gorsline, I admitted to being put off by an email I had received while a volunteer, addressed from local veteran advocate Mike Botelho. I had never spoken to Botelho, but Gorsline had. After being read the email’s contents, Gorsline did not think Botelho had wrote it. Consequently, I forwarded the relevant email thread (from eight months before I became campaign staff) to Gorsline and Jamie Morey to determine its authenticity. Within a couple hours of my conversation with Gorsline, strategic leadership approved providing Gorsline with official campaign emails sent to Botelho to assist with possible reporting.

After being alerted, Botelho claimed he had never sent the email in question to me. Furthermore, Botelho and another veteran, who still had access to the email account from which the message originated, discovered there were many emails that had been sent as if they came from Botelho that, according to Botelho, had been sent without his knowledge or consent. Botelho and the veteran promptly inquired whether the ballot committee could assist them in sending a cease and desist letter to James Davis, who they knew had access to the email account and who they presumed had been impersonating Botelho. While the ballot committee chair/campaign manager appeared open to introducing Botelho and the veteran to lawyers, to my knowledge, the campaign did not help either of them find legal assistance. Ultimately, Botelho and the veteran emailed Davis an informal cease and desist notice in lieu of taking legal action. Davis acknowledged having sent messages under Botelho’s name but insisted he had done so with adequate permission.

The revelation of the alleged impersonation put the campaign in a bind. On the one hand, Botelho’s credible allegation was politically advantageous insomuch as it discredited an opponent of the ballot question, Davis. On the other hand, Botelho’s allegation was politically disadvantageous insomuch as it associated Massachusetts psychedelics, and the ballot committee that had donated $35,000 to Davis’s nonprofit, with scandal, poor judgement, and the exploitation of veterans. The campaign reacted to this situation by encouraging Gorsline to report on the topic while discouraging him from shopping the story to major outlets. To try to steer Gorsline away from offering the story to The Boston Globe or another publication of similar stature, the ballot committee’s de facto communications director spoke with him one on one. When Gorsline published his June 2024 story on the alleged impersonation in Talking Joints Memo, a local cannabis media platform, it was considered a desirable outcome from the campaign’s perspective.

Gorsline’s reporting spurred an outpouring of public condemnations of Davis’s alleged misconduct, past and present. Nationally renowned drug policy advocates, including Jason Ortiz and Shaleen Title (as previously referenced), joined in, with Ortiz characterizing Davis as “the most despicable of swindlers” and claiming Davis had engaged in “the outright sabotage of decrim efforts in multiple states.” The mounting pile of credible allegations of unethical behavior directed toward Davis, for which he largely provided no explanations, as well as his proven track record of making grossly inaccurate statements, unequivocally disqualified him from being a legitimate grassroots spokesperson on the merits.

But, by this time, Davis was a superficially well-known source to journalists covering the ballot question and many volunteers who did not read Talking Joints Memo and who were not deeply familiar with the drug policy space. Furthermore, Davis had spent nearly a year sowing strong wariness of the Question 4 campaign through his nonprofit network and the media, including by promoting a conspiracy mentality, with little pushback. The publication of Gorsline’s article and its enthusiastic reception within certain activist circles were consequently insufficient, by themselves, to discredit Davis as a credible political voice statewide.

A Persistent Mistrust

Campaign outreach regularly encountered liberal Massachusetts residents aligned with James Davis’s opposition talking points about the measure being excessively restrictive and a corporate cash grab. Despite my background as a local grassroots volunteer, I repeatedly experienced palpable mistrust of the campaign from progressive advocates both online and in-person.

One notable example was when I attended the October 9, 2024, Easthampton city council meeting at which a resolution to endorse the ballot question was considered. As reported by a local newspaper:

Many audience members and councilors feared that the language of the law establishing a regulatory commission for these psychedelic substances would promote regulatory capture, prioritizing the interests of businesses over the herbalists, healers and Indigenous groups that use these substances in regular and often sacred practices.

In response to expressed concerns, I improvised my testimony to emphasize my volunteer background and personal commitment to working toward the best possible policy, which appeared to be well received by the audience but did not prevent the coverage of the (ultimately successful) resolution from being marred by prominent mention of Question 4’s perceived faults.

For another notable example, a well-connected progressive former chair of the Worcester Human Rights Commission with over a thousand Instagram followers (and thousands of social media followers on TikTok and on Facebook) posted a video parroting Davis’s talking points on October 20, 2024, which received hundreds of likes. To contextualize this, Worcester is Massachusetts’ second largest city (with a population of more than 200,000) and a progressive community, where over 54% of voters backed legalizing recreational cannabis in 2016, over 67% of voters backed allowing transgender individuals to access public bathrooms in accordance with their gender identity rather than their biological sex in 2018, and 59% of voters backed a 4% tax hike on millionaires and allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses in 2022. And the Worcester Human Rights Commission had already passed a pro-psychedelics resolution. Yet when I reached out to the poster of the video to provide clarification, I received a skeptical response that included an invitation to dialogue “if you’re [(Graham Moore)] genuinely interested in talking” (emphasis in italics mine). And, after the poster encouraged me to send a script for a follow-up video from a proponent’s perspective, he declined to use it because of the actions of “your [(Graham’s Moore’s)] colleagues and friends” and stated that he “remain[ed] concerned about the issues [he’d] raised” in the video echoing Davis’s arguments. His stance may have been a bellwether, as 54% of Worcester voters rejected Question 4 two weeks later.

Anecdotally, the misinformation spread by Bay Staters for Natural Medicine appeared to penetrate far and wide in progressive circles. When a family member living in an extremely progressive Boston suburb told a fellow town resident that I was working for the Yes on 4 campaign, the initial response my family member got was surprise that someone from such a liberal pedigree as myself would work for what was, in the fellow resident’s mind, a corrupt campaign seeking to monopolize access to natural psychedelics. Another family member living in very progressive Cambridge, Massachusetts was aghast to see Davis’s positions promoted on social media by a longtime friend less than a couple weeks before the election. In response to the latter incident, I frantically texted the friend to correct the record and, fortunately, he voted yes on the measure.

A June 2024 internal poll indirectly provided additional insight into the statewide reach of Bay Staters for Natural Medicine’s talking points. While the poll suggested relatively few Massachusetts voters were familiar with, or trusting of, Bay Staters for Natural Medicine (only 58% of respondents had even heard of the organization), a slightly larger percentage of respondents (27%) thought the group was believable than thought the dedicated opposition committee was believable (24%). Roughly equal percentages of respondents thought the two groups were not believable (24% thought Bay Staters for Natural Medicine was not believable and 22% thought the dedicated opposition committee was not believable). But a whopping 81% of respondents thought the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society was believable and, as previously mentioned, the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society as well as the dedicated opposition committee amplified certain of Davis’s contentions.

To my knowledge, the campaign never polled to what extent New Approach and Dewey Square Group were considered believable for comparison. Such polling would have been helpful since media coverage, influenced by Davis, regularly mentioned the two organizations’ involvement in advancing Question 4. For example, an August 2024 MassLive article characterized the Yes on 4 ballot committee as “an arm of New Approach, a Washington, D.C., political action committee” and prominently noted campaign spokesperson Jennifer Manley was “a principal of Dewey Square Group, a political consulting group.” This article also quoted Davis as a credible voice.

In the absence of additional relevant polling data, it is impossible to determine with much accuracy how influential and pervasive Davis’s left-wing critiques truly were. To my knowledge, the campaign never tested the effectiveness of left-wing arguments against the measure in any survey.

A Contradictory Containment Strategy

The approach of Yes on 4’s strategic leadership to containing James Davis and his organization was inconsistent and contradictory. As previously mentioned, the campaign spent eight months wooing Davis, up to $150,000 in lobbying to counter his legislative influence, and, to my knowledge, campaign organizers were involved in directing over $130,000 to support an effort to replace Davis’s organization. These were substantial and costly efforts, appropriate for managing a highly influential political entity.

However, after Davis and his organization began officially opposing the ballot question in April 2024, strategic leadership justified maintaining a soft gloves approach by claiming Davis was more or less politically insignificant and, simultaneously, a somewhat helpful foil, whose presence made the ballot question seem more restrictive (and consequently more appealing to swing voters) than it actually was.

Finally, in a last-minute reversal, strategic leadership determined it was “time to crank up the heat from all angles on [Davis]” on October 7, 2024, a month before election day. If Davis was important enough to “crank up the heat” in October 2024, why wasn’t he important enough to counter aggressively earlier? I was not provided with an explanation from strategic leadership.

One possible explanation is that these contradictory stances were the result of high-level disagreements regarding strategy, which the developments described below were suggestive of.

Around the end of summer 2024, I was told by a member of strategic leadership that preventing Davis from being referenced as a credible source was a high priority, but Davis continued to be prominently quoted for months after that.

Multiple journalists, who covered the psychedelics campaign for major outlets, privately claimed they did not recall the campaign informing them about Davis’s lack of credibility, despite a member of strategic leadership stating in a July 19, 2024 email thread that she would “compile a list of who has covered [the psychedelics campaign] frequently and reach out to them” about Davis.

It is notable that Boston.com quoted Davis as a credible expert twice in the final weeks of the campaign, on October 1 and October 28, 2024, despite strategic leadership claiming to have contacted a Boston.com reporter and arranged a call to address Davis on July 19, 2024. While a Boston.com reporter privately confirmed they “had communication” with a campaign official in 2024, they declined to provide more information about the nature, content, or timing of their contact. It is possible Boston.com chose to continue referencing Davis despite being thoroughly informed.

A rumor spread toward the end of the campaign that might have reflected faulty internal communication that complicated messaging in addition to conflicting strategic perspectives. I was told by multiple members of strategic leadership that there was concern Gorsline was spreading harmful information, possibly derived from Jamie and me, to local journalists. As previously mentioned, I was authorized to maintain a special relationship with Gorsline on behalf of the campaign, and I promptly confronted Gorsline about the issue. Gorsline protested his innocence, and I shared this information with strategic leadership. The rebuttal I received from a certain member of strategic leadership was that a particular, named, reputable journalist from a major media outlet, who a different member of strategic leadership spoke with “every other day,” had informed the campaign that “Jack Gorsline” was proliferating insulting information. Later, I learned with surety that these claims were inaccurate: the journalist had said nothing of the kind to any campaign official, nor had they spoken to any campaign official more than infrequently. If information was regularly getting confused such that it could produce such a rumor, it might partially explain an inconsistent approach to Davis.

The campaign adopted a muted response to Davis’s opposition, apart from leaking to Gorsline and selectively addressing misinformation, until September 25, 2024. On that day, the campaign sent a rebuttal of Davis, including links to Gorsline’s reporting, to the entire school newspaper press list (but not to the general press list). And, as previously referenced, starting on October 7, 2024, strategic leadership endorsed “[cranking] up the heat from all angles on [Davis],” although it is unclear to what extent this was followed through. Regardless, it was likely too late by October 2024 to reduce Davis’s public credibility in a politically meaningful way and, to my knowledge, the campaign was not successful in doing so.

“A Bang-up Job”

As Yes on 4 lead strategist Lynda Tocci admitted in a June 2024 internal email: “James [Davis] did a bang-up job corralling opposition.”

Davis had an outsized impact on the campaign, including:

Post-mortem polling suggested around 3% of Massachusetts voters who participated in the 2024 election opposed Question 4 despite supporting the expansive decriminalization of natural psychedelics, including home-growing. Considering the numerous ways Davis appeared to influence the operation of the campaign, this number likely understates the impact of his organizing, and Yes on 4’s response to it, on the election outcome.