The Campaign Elevated a Divisive and Hostile Activist to Statewide Prominence Despite Forewarning - A Substantial Risk and a Misinformation Blitz

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

A Substantial Risk

As affirmed by one of the campaign’s chief strategists in the aforementioned podcast last year, it is important to electoral success to have a united community behind a measure:

Question 4 campaign consultant Lynda Tocci (“the strategy brain” of the campaign): I think one of the things that is really important [...] is who is the group behind the Yes or No side that you’re with. Is it a cohesive group? Have you learned how to work together, how to disagree and agree, how to move forward, make decisions? [...] I think that’s a really primary, important part.

On July 10, 2023, New Approach was warned by a high-profile drug policy expert in an email that the campaign was unlikely to succeed in part because of “the groups on the ground” in Massachusetts:

I have to decline to get involved. I’ve heard complaints by local groups on the ground in OR and CO who felt left out, and at the same time I have major concerns about the groups on the ground in MA, so I don’t see any scenario where this goes well. [...] My honest opinion is that Massachusetts is just not ready.

One of the faces of Massachusetts psychedelics reform was James Davis, the leader of the advocacy group Bay Staters for Natural Medicine (now rebranded as Bay Staters for Creative Well-Being). He and his group were credited with significant accomplishments, particularly decriminalization resolutions passed in multiple cities and towns.

But Davis was a divisive figure, which New Approach had at least a hint of long before the campaign, since a New Approach staff member allegedly witnessed Davis insult a non-white advocate with a racially prejudiced remark (the New Approach staff member informed me of this). And Davis was far from the only public-facing advocate in the state, as evidenced by the joint press release he issued with local veteran Mike Botelho and Jamie Morey on July 17, 2023.

Yet when New Approach ramped up its advocacy in Massachusetts, practically the only notable grassroots advocate it involved in drafting the legislation, and pitched a major partnership to, was Davis. This was reflected in an official response to criticism that the campaign began “without consulting local advocates.” The response noted Davis’s early involvement and no one else’s. A July 2023 email exchange between Davis and a New Approach staff member shows Davis was provided specific draft language, invited to broadly weigh in on the ballot question proposal, and encouraged to partner with the campaign for “public education, coalition building, and signature gathering.”

On August 1, 2023, the campaign gave $35,000 to Davis’s organization, comprising the official ballot committee’s only donation to a nonprofit. Davis’s organization endorsed the home cultivation version of the ballot question the next day. Legally, the ballot committee could “pay and expend money or other things of value solely” to promote the ballot measure, so the large donation signaled campaign leadership thought Davis would be an asset. In fact, Davis remained intractably opposed to the campaign, despite the nominal endorsement.

That it was politically risky for the ballot committee to elevate Davis was clear. Davis’s nonprofit provided access to underground psychedelic therapy, championed politically unpopular unregulated cultivation and distribution of psychedelics, and publicly declared it “[stood] in opposition to the corporations trying to charge people thousands of dollars for [natural psychedelics],” a category that could arguably include all the legal psilocybin therapy businesses in Oregon, where the typical cost of a treatment session was $1,000 or more, under the state-regulated framework backed by New Approach.

Campaign finance law guaranteed the donation to Bay Staters for Natural Medicine would shortly become public, disclosing the ballot committee’s de facto endorsement of Davis’s organization. At best, this endorsement would undercut the campaign’s ostensible focus on “licensed, supervised psychedelic therapy.” At worst, it would tie Davis and his organization to the ballot committee in the event of a scandal, such as a tragic outcome of unregulated psychedelic use or an allegation of serious misconduct, potentially tanking the campaign.

The decision to donate to Davis’s psychedelics decriminalization nonprofit was made even after internal polling showed the most popular arguments in favor of the ballot measure were:

If the campaign had not provided Davis (who was not a healthcare provider, researcher, or veteran) $35,000 for his nonprofit, but had still wanted to donate to a complementary organization, the ballot committee could have spent that money supporting a healthcare advocacy, research, or veterans nonprofit instead. Polling suggests such an alternative would have generated more enthusiasm from the public, and been less politically risky, than the donation to Bay Staters for Natural Medicine.

Although Davis purported to be representing a coalition including veteran Mike Botelho and Jamie Morey (married to a veteran), to my knowledge, New Approach never spoke to Botelho, and a New Approach staff member met Morey for the first time on September 20, 2023, nearly two months after the measure language had been finalized with Davis’s input. Consequently, New Approach was not aware that Davis had concealed the offer to weigh in on policy, and his involvement in the drafting process, from Botelho and Morey, and that Davis had not been authorized to negotiate with the campaign unilaterally on behalf of his veteran community co-leaders.

To my knowledge, the campaign also did not speak to any Bay Staters for Natural Medicine board members, apart from Davis, before authorizing the $35,000 donation. The publicly listed clerk was based in Taiwan. The publicly listed treasurer was, by her own account, on the verge of leaving the organization at the time, and she characterized Davis as “verbally abusive,” expressed fear he had “forged documents,” and claimed she “[had] no clue about any donations or earnings Baystaters has.” Speaking with these board members might have made the campaign more wary of Davis’s nonprofit, which had not yet received 501(c)(3) tax exempt status or made public any detailed financial filings (the nonprofit retroactively filed state-mandated financial disclosures for 2022-2023 just a few months ago, which I confirmed over the phone with the state attorney general’s office).

Another reason the campaign might have kept its distance from Bay Staters for Natural Medicine was its combination of legislative advocacy and providing services. Under Massachusetts’s strict lobbying laws, a nonprofit must register with the state secretary and make certain disclosures if it spends more than $250 per year “to promote, oppose, or influence legislation” and “pay[s] a salary or fee to any member for any activities performed for the benefit of the group or organization.” In describing its network of psychedelic guides, Davis’s nonprofit claimed it needed “financial support with donations to sustain its progress, hold events and do marketing that lift all ships, and ensure that giant corporations do not destroy this network with corrupt state legislation” and recommended guides “give 30% of any [compensation] they receive [for facilitation] as a donation.” While Davis later claimed in March 2024 that his “facilitator network” had not spent “any” of the “about $100,000” it had raised since its June 2022 launch, the launch included Bay Staters for Natural Medicine claiming to be “hiring skilled and compassionate people as psychedelic facilitators.” That Davis’s nonprofit was not registered with the state secretary was publicly available information, and, while Bay Staters for Natural Medicine may have complied with lobbying laws, its public statements and unregulated lobbying risked attracting embarrassing legal scrutiny.

Furthermore, if the campaign had asked one of Massachusetts’s most prominent drug policy advocates, Shaleen Title, about Davis, she would have shared that Davis had a history of alleged unethical behavior. In 2024, Title publicly claimed that “People in MA, women and POC especially, have been privately warning each other for years about James Davis/Bay Staters.”

As Title might have predicted, Davis soon turned on his would-be ballot committee collaborators. A campaign spokesperson disclosed: “It was almost like... once that money was donated, then [Davis’s] attitude totally changed.” The spokesperson went on to observe Davis appeared to have kept the donation from the campaign largely secret, which was, indeed, the case. As previously referenced, Davis also hid his involvement with drafting the measure, falsely claiming the ballot committee “did not consult with any organization in [the grassroots advocacy] coalition.”

A Misinformation Blitz

A little over a month after his nonprofit received $35,000 from the campaign, and just a few days after being privately invited by New Approach to a coalition meeting, James Davis lambasted the ballot question in a public presentation to “more than 60 lawmakers and staff,” and his organization published an op-ed attacking the measure the next day. His criticism focused on inadequate decriminalization and “the regulatory structure of the program,” which he implied were consequences of his exclusion from the drafting process.

In reality, Davis himself was significantly responsible for the measure as written, particularly the parts he ostensibly took most issue with. In his correspondence with New Approach, he had been specifically encouraged to provide “feedback on any aspects” of the “decrim/home cultivation language,” and he was asked explicitly if “[he] and the [grassroots] coalition have thoughts about” what regulatory agency would be most appropriate. Rather than replying with substantive policy feedback, Davis had answered “our top priority is community education. Modest, home growing (microdosing) excites volunteers vis a vis An Act Relative to Plant Medicine and the six cities we’ve decriminalized.” As previously mentioned, Question 4’s decriminalization provisions were more far reaching than those in An Act Relative to Plant Medicine, and Davis’s nonprofit had endorsed the final version of the measure on August 2, 2023.

But rather than promptly correct the record, the campaign let Davis define the public narrative practically unopposed. As a consequence, Davis hammered the ballot question in major media outlets like The Boston Globe and WBUR month after month after month as, essentially, a poorly-written, out-of-touch cash grab pitting locals against an out-of-state PAC. Simultaneously, he organized on-the-ground opposition to the campaign, using his nonprofit volunteers to disrupt signature gathering, to canvass against the measure, and to encourage lawmakers and state organizations, including the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society, the Massachusetts Medical Society, the Massachusetts Fraternal Order of Police, the Massachusetts Municipal Association, and multiple other organizations, to oppose the ballot question.

Bay Staters for Natural Medicine’s talking points were subsequently incorporated into opposition statements from:

And, by early February 2024, Davis had utilized his narrative to convince the municipal governments of tourist-haven Provincetown (on December 11, 2023) and Boston-adjacent, Tufts University-home Medford (on February 6, 2024) to pass resolutions criticizing Question 4 as “a ballot question written by a DC-based PAC.”

Public reporting later appeared to corroborate that Davis’s activity was coordinated, at least in part, with other parties opposed to the measure. It was revealed that, on April 4, 2024, Davis had emailed the Massachusetts assistant attorney general to propose modified ballot language in coordination with, he claimed, “several organizations” intending to form “an opposition committee,” including the ardently drug prohibitionist Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions. On May 2, 2024, after an official opposition committee had launched, The Boston Herald reported that the opposition committee “[had] been in conversations with another group Bay Staters for Natural Medicine, which opposes the creation of an ‘unelected control commission prone to regulatory capture by interests outside our communities.’”

A Rising (and Fabricated) Hero

After declining an interview request from The Boston Globe, New Approach provided the campaign’s first public response to James Davis’s misinformation in an exclusive interview with Talking Joints Memo journalist Jack Gorsline for an article published on February 8, 2024, two days after the Medford resolution criticizing the ballot question was passed. This interview, given months before Jamie Morey and I were hired by the ballot committee, was the start of a series of exclusives the campaign’s strategic leadership provided Gorsline.

While the campaign spokesperson told Gorsline that Davis was “making false claims” about the content of the ballot question and “suggested [Davis] may have acted in bad faith” to solicit money, the spokesperson still did not debunk Davis’s central falsehood that he had been wrongfully excluded from the drafting process.

Davis’s public profile appeared to be elevated substantially by his feigned victimization. Prior to October 2023, he had never been featured in The Boston Globe. Prior to January 2024, he had never been covered in Boston Magazine. Prior to October 2024, he had never been referenced in USA Today. And these are just a few illustrative examples.

There were other compelling grassroots advocates besides Davis, such as local police officer Sarko Gergerian, but what set Davis apart was his unmatched ferocity against the ballot question. Davis had fabricated a story that made him the central protagonist and was appealing to journalists: a principled, scrappy local activist leading the charge against the corrupt, out-of-state PAC that spurned the grassroots. Had the campaign exposed him early, he likely would have quickly become politically irrelevant, as he is now (to my knowledge, Davis has not been quoted by any Massachusetts or national news outlet since 2024, even with ongoing coverage of psychedelics legislation in Massachusetts).

And if the campaign had stopped Davis’s bad faith crusade from being a media focus, more conventionally appealing movement representatives, like police officers, doctors, veterans and mothers, could have been elevated as faces of the psychedelics grassroots instead.

Making the situation worse, the campaign was late and inconsistent in utilizing a sympathetic official spokesperson. Over and over again, the only individuals offering comment on behalf of the ballot committee were clearly hired guns: New Approach employees and a Dewey Square Group principal. This set up an unflattering contrast with Davis’s opposition, which repeatedly wove in the voices of local veterans and other compelling figures. Local veteran Emily Oneschuk started functioning as an official campaign spokesperson in December 2023 but did not offer comment consistently. For example, less than two weeks before election day, on October 21, 2024, a Dewey Square Group principal was the only campaign official quoted in a WBUR rundown, which characterized the ballot committee as “funded by the Washington, D.C.-based New Approach PAC,” echoing Davis’s opposition talking points (the only direct financial support from New Approach PAC was a $60,000 loan).

An Expensive Endorsement

Despite James Davis’s persistent opposition to, and dishonesty about, the ballot question, the campaign continued to court Davis as a partner with repeated overtures through at least the end of February 2024. These included reaching out “several times by email and text during the fall [in 2023],” a meeting between Emily Oneschuk and Davis at the end of 2023, in which Davis spooked Oneschuk enough to contribute to her brief resignation from the campaign, an outreach email on January 5, 2024, in which strategic leadership characterized Davis as an “important [leader]” whose involvement with the campaign was “critical,” a second meeting with Oneschuk after January 12, 2024, and a meeting with strategic leadership (two Dewey Square Group principals) on February 26, 2024.

Simultaneously, beginning as early as January 1, 2024, the ballot committee employed Dewey Square Group for lobbying to counter Davis’s influence in the legislature, ultimately spending $150,000 on lobbying, a relatively large amount. For comparison, Fortune 500 company Molina Healthcare, Inc. paid Dewey Square Group $96,000 for lobbying related to the state government program it operates.

Despite the ballot committee’s less than $10 million budget being dwarfed by annual revenues, ranging into the billions, of Dewey Square Group’s other clients, the ballot committee (Massachusetts for Mental Health Options) became Dewey Square Group’s second largest Massachusetts state-level lobbying client in 2024:

According to Dewey Square Group, the lobbying was related to Bay Staters for Natural Medicine’s push to get a competing proposal on the ballot. This characterization is supported by public disclosures showing Dewey Square Group was paid by the ballot committee to lobby exclusively regarding H.4255 (the ballot question legislation before it was sent to the ballot) with a “neutral” position.

As a reminder, ballot committees in Massachusetts are legally obligated “to expend money or other things of value solely for the purpose of favoring or opposing the adoption or rejection of a specific question or questions submitted to the voters.” Furthermore, under Massachusetts law, paid work encouraging lawmakers to endorse a measure before voters is not regulated as lobbying, but paid work encouraging lawmakers to adopt or reject a proposal to place an alternative measure on the ballot is.

Consequently, Davis’s effort to convince lawmakers to send an alternative measure to the ballot created a unique circumstance in which a ballot committee could, relatively easily, justify paying for regulated lobbying. The novelty of this situation was reflected in the fact no other Massachusetts ballot committee active in 2024 reported any lobbying spending.

The alternative psychedelics measure was notable for other reasons, too:

To summarize: the ballot committee determined it was appropriate to pay Dewey Square Group up to $150,000 for lobbying, more than Dewey Square Group was paid for lobbying by any other state-level lobbying client in Massachusetts that year save one, in response to a longshot, likely unconstitutional, legislative proposal championed by a former legislative staffer with a poor reputation and little influence among state lawmakers.

This contributed to the campaign expending, to my knowledge, far more resources on responding to Davis, and his relatively small psychedelics decriminalization/underground therapy organization (Bay Staters for Natural Medicine), than it did on influencing the public position of any other entity. As partially reflected in the above disclosures, in addition to the $35,000 donation and the $150,000 in lobbying, considerable staff and volunteer time was invested in courting Davis for eight months (July 2023 through February 2024) and then in efforts to contain him for another nine months (March 2024 through November 2024) until election day.

For example, encouraged by, and in collaboration with, the campaign, five months of my volunteer advocacy (October 2023 through February 2024) were focused, in significant part, on trying to bring Davis and the ballot committee together. My efforts included floating unity proposals, helping prepare strategic leadership for the February 2024 meeting with Davis, and acting as a go-between for the ballot committee and Davis. The ballot committee’s lead spokesperson even gave me “props” for having donated thousands of dollars to Bay Staters for Natural Medicine and told me there was “100% no reason you shouldn’t be supportive of [Bay Staters for Natural Medicine]” unless it went “nuclear […] in a really toxic way” as late as February 4, 2024.

By the time of the ballot question’s key legislative hearing on March 26, 2024, the ballot committee had spent over $700,000 excluding signature gathering costs, and, to my knowledge, had earned only a single public endorsement from a Massachusetts organization: the nominal endorsement of Davis-led Bay Staters for Natural Medicine.

By contrast, the opposition to the ballot question, having spent practically no money comparatively, had already gained support from two influential healthcare professional organizations: the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society and the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Despite the extensive effort to win him over, Davis criticized the measure he had nominally endorsed at the March 26 hearing, and, subsequently, Bay Staters for Natural Medicine officially rescinded its endorsement just a few weeks later. To my knowledge, this left the ballot question with no endorsements from local organizations out the gate. Almost certainly, the campaign’s decision to chase a partnership with Davis had significantly reduced its likelihood of success.

Personally, had I known of Davis’s deception at the same time as the ballot committee, I would not have spent the many hours of free time, and the over $3,000 in personal donations, that I did supporting Bay Staters for Natural Medicine as a volunteer from September 2023 through February 2024. I would not have been comfortable trying to win over someone who had appeared to operate in such bad faith toward the ballot committee as well as fellow grassroots advocates.

As it happened, I only learned the truth in late March 2024, when the campaign finally informed select grassroots advocates of Davis’s involvement in the drafting process.

Shortly after, the campaign made this information public by directly leaking internal communications (not using advocates like Jamie Morey and me as intermediaries) exclusively to local journalist Jack Gorsline for a Talking Joints Memo article published April 3, 2024. For the same article, the campaign provided Gorsline an exclusive reaction quote from lead spokesperson Oneschuk, who did not disclose the campaign’s responsibility for the leak and who implicitly kept the door open to “collaborating” with Davis.

One of Massachusetts’ most active grassroots advocates, in response to the leak, said Davis would have been “laughed out of the room” if the facts had been revealed earlier. As it was, Davis had spent more than half a year mobilizing opposition, and becoming the face of the psychedelics grassroots, on the basis of a largely unconfronted lie, undermining support for Question 4 in a way that was difficult to undo.

A Special Relationship

Rather than immediately using Jack Gorsline’s reporting as a springboard to broadly correct the record with journalists, the campaign chose to largely limit its pushback to giving exclusives to Gorsline, who had only a relatively small readership, even after James Davis’s organization began formally opposing the ballot question. Subsequently, Davis was consistently referenced as a credible opponent of the measure by major media outlets, like USA Today, The Boston Globe, and Boston.com, up to a week before election day.

The campaign’s shots at Davis via Gorsline included:

Other exclusives the campaign provided to Gorsline included:

As reflected in an email in which the ballot committee chair/campaign manager characterizes a summary of an off-the-record conversation between Gorsline and me as “super helpful,” a uniquely open line of communication to Gorsline was perceived as an asset. During the campaign, strategic leadership assisted, appreciated, and disseminated Gorsline’s journalism. Illustrating the point, on October 9, 2024, the ballot committee chair/campaign manager insisted on citing Gorsline’s reporting in an official campaign communication against my recommendation.

The resultingly high familiarity Gorsline had with the campaign meant he was uniquely aware of its shortcomings, which he commented on in a December 2024 op-ed and co-reported on in a three-part series for Lucid News in 2025: “Whistleblowers Claim 2024 MA Psychedelics Ballot Initiative Violated Campaign Finance Laws,” “Details of Alleged MA Initiative Campaign Finance Violations In New OCPF Complaints,” and “How (Not) To Win A Campaign: Lessons From Question 4.”

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-gr