Lexi sat under a highway overpass where she sleeps near a stretch of Massachusetts Avenue nicknamed "Methadone Mile" in Boston last April.

Just 49-percent of adult patients who check into state-licensed residential substance abuse centers complete their treatment programs, while a substantial portion of patients walk away from treatment or relapse, according to a new state report.

And despite intense focus by advocates and government officials to cast opioid addiction as not a character problem but a public health crisis, the stigma attached to substance abuse remains "a significant deterrent to seeking care."

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In November, Massachusetts voters decided to make recreational marijuana legal, allowing it to be bought and sold in stores by January 2018. But this week, state lawmakers quietly voted to delay the sale date by at least six months.

The delay has outraged some marijuana-legalization advocates, less so because they'll have to wait a few months to buy pot and more so because they feel the legislature is trying to subvert the will of the people by fundamentally changing what they voted for. A similar skirmish is happening in Maine over the minimum wage, and progressives in both states are worried that their opponents are trying to delay or even reverse their remarkable success via ballot initiatives.

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THE PASSAGE OF the marijuana legalization referendum in November doesn't mean that the new law's exact language must stay frozen in amber forever. But the fact that the law was approved directly by the voters should mean that lawmakers consider changes with more caution than they showed on Wednesday, when both the House and Senate approved a six-month delay to some of the law's provisions without hearings or a formal roll-call vote.

That decision, reached in informal session and sent to Governor Charlie Baker for his signature, doesn't change the basic structure of the legalization law. But if approved by Baker, it would slightly delay the opening of marijuana retail stores in Massachusetts and the creation of a new commission to oversee the industry. Legislative leaders say the delay will help implement legalization effectively.

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Dugan Arnett wandered down Winter Street while looking for marijuana in Boston.

Call me old-fashioned, but I trusted Nancy Reagan when she urged me to Just Say No. I listened when McGruff the Crime Dog insisted that "users are losers." And when my younger sister arrived home one night back in high school smelling of the devil's lettuce, I did what any self-respecting graduate of the DARE program would do: I told my mom.

So when my boss approached me to ask if I'd be willing to go out on Thursday - the day marijuana officially became legal in Massachusetts - and attempt to buy some, it's safe to say I was caught off guard.

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Just a half-dozen Massachusetts legislators passed a controversial measure on Wednesday delaying the opening date for recreational marijuana stores in Massachusetts by six months.

How could so few legislators decide such an important issue?

The move, which took less than an hour, was extraordinary, but technically allowed.

Here's how it works.

First, keep in mind that legislative cycles in Massachusetts run on two-year calendars, beginning in odd-numbered years. So currently, we are at the end of a two-year cycle that began in 2015.

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A man showed the marijuana he was selling on Boston Common earlier this month.

It took less than an hour and about a half-dozen state legislators to undo the will of 1.8 million voters expressed just last month.

The House and Senate passed a bill on Wednesday delaying the opening date for recreational marijuana stores in Massachusetts by half a year - from January to summer 2018.

The extraordinary move would unravel a significant part of the marijuana law. About 1.5 million people voted against legalization on Nov. 8.

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BOSTON -- The process for licensing retail marijuana shops would be delayed by six months under legislation that surfaced Wednesday in the Senate before clearing both branches, the result of which could push the legal sale of marijuana, authorized by a successful ballot campaign this year, well into 2018.

The House and Senate on Wednesday morning during lightly attended informal sessions passed a bill (S 2524) amended by Sen. Jason Lewis, D-Winchester, pushing out the effective dates of several key milestones in the new law, including the dates by which the state will begin accepting applications and issuing licenses for retail pot shop licenses. The state, under the bill, would have until July 2018 to issue the first licenses for retail pot sales.

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Andrew Freedman is Colorado's director of marijuana coordination.

DENVER - Marijuana legalization brought unexpected challenges to Colorado, and it was rarely clear what part of state government was supposed to solve them, or how.

Businesses were selling marijuana-infused, animal-shaped candy attractive to children. Residents growing pot at home were selling it illegally in other states. Growers were applying pesticides to cannabis plants even though none was specifically approved by the federal government for such use.

Enter Andrew Freedman, Colorado's pot czar, who is bringing together the state's bureaucracy, marijuana industry, law enforcement community, and public health advocates to fix problems no other state had faced.

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Deadly synthetic opioids are streaming into the United States amid a flood of mail that arrives unscreened from abroad every day, overwhelming the Postal Service and fueling the drug epidemic gripping much of the country, security experts and Massachusetts lawmakers say.

Nearly 1 million packages a day enter the country without any advance electronic information that might flag the presence of dangerous opioids such as fentanyl, much of which is manufactured in China, said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant Homeland Security secretary.

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[photo] Bonnie Bruce is the mother of a Vermont woman, Tamara, who was found the day after Thanksgiving passed out from heroin in her car with her fiance and their two young children.

DORSET, Vt. - The midnight phone call woke them all up. As Bonnie Bruce struggled to understand what the police officer was saying, her 11-year-old grandson, Elias, appeared in her bedroom doorway and walked to her bedside, listening. He knew: It was about his mother.

"Wait a minute, what are you telling me?" Bonnie gasped into the phone. The coil of dread lodged hard in her gut for the past 11 years, since her daughter first shot heroin into the soft crook of her elbow, abruptly gave way. "Is she all right?"

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Massachusetts voters legalized the sale and recreational use of marijuana when they passed Question 4 in November. Folks who work in the cannabis industry, who authored that legislation, want to squeeze as much as they can out of the Bay State market even if it means exploiting minority communities.

Oh, they wouldn't describe it that way. The authors of the legislation instead called for regulators to encourage "full participation" in the new industry "by people from communities that have previously been disproportionately harmed by marijuana prohibition and enforcement and to positively impact those communities."

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City Hall, cops, pols spearhead informational campaign

Cops, City Hall and lawmakers are bracing for Thursday's onset of legalized "recreational" marijuana in Massachusetts, determined that if they can't dissuade tokers from lighting up they can at least provide information plus some vigilant law enforcement to try to keep people safe.

Bay Staters voted last month to permit adults 21 and older to possess up to an ounce of weed while out in public - 10 ounces at home - while cultivating up to 12 plants per household. Selling pot remains illegal while the Legislature works on regulations to license retailers.

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It was the night after Thanksgiving.

The little boy, not quite 3, wore no socks, despite the cold.

He sat on his unconscious mother's lap in the idling car, a spray of vomit dried on the window, according to the police. His father was slumped on the steering wheel, his seat belt wrapped around his arm like a tourniquet.

In the back seat, the toddler's baby brother slept under a blanket.

The parents, Tamara Bruce, 33, and Jacob Davis, 27, later told police that they had driven their children more than three hours from Manchester, Vt., to Lawrence to buy heroin and shoot up. When they passed out in a parking lot, another driver thought they were dead and summoned police.

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Granite State cops are bracing for a potential influx of doped-up drivers and pot-smoking teens - even without a marijuana legalization question on the New Hampshire ballot - as Massachusetts and Maine voters could legalize the herb in November.

"You're going to have more instances of drugged driving, and it's going to cost the state more money because of the increase in law enforcement and prosecution," said Dalton, N.H., police Chief John Tholl, who is also a state representative opposed to marijuana legalization. "It's just going to be a burden on the legal system."

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OK, so maybe the helicopter was a little excessive.

It's reasonable to criticize the lengths that authorities went to in an effort to confiscate a single pot plant from an elderly woman in Amherst - though it should be noted that the backyard raid at Peg Holcomb's home was just a small part of a larger marijuana eradication operation.

But before sympathizers anoint the 81-year-old Holcomb a great martyr for the marijuana cause, we would simply point out that in Massachusetts there are legal means by which she could obtain marijuana if she really does need it to keep her glaucoma at bay, as she told the Herald.

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BOSTON - The surge in deaths from drug overdoses has become an unexpected lifeline for people waiting for organ transplants, turning tragedy for some into salvation for others.

As more people die from overdoses than ever before, their organs - donated in advance by them or after the fact by their families - are saving lives of people who might otherwise die waiting for a transplant.

When Dave and Roxanne Maleham got the call in June that they had long dreaded - that their son, Matt, 38, was on life support after overdosing on heroin and fentanyl - they talked about donating his organs.

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Misleading the public and condescending to grieving parents is one approach to win supporters to your cause, but we can't imagine it's a winning one for the supporters of Question 4.

Organizers of the campaign to legalize the recreational use of marijuana sent out a fundraising email last week in which they blurred the lines between general pot use, which the ballot question would legalize, and use of marijuana for medical purposes, which of course is already legal.

"If you think people in our state deserve a safer alternative to prescription painkillers, please help end marijuana prohibition on November 8 by donating today," wrote campaign manager Will Luzier, who cites the opioid crisis and deaths from overdoses as an incentive to vote yes.

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It was with a mixture of dismay and amusement - at the absurdity of it - that I read the quote in the short item "Guns barred for marijuana card holders" (Daily Briefing, Sept. 1). In the ruling by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, regarding the denial of gun purchases to medical marijuana card holders, Senior District Judge Jed Rakoff said that the use of marijuana "raises the risk of irrational or unpredictable behavior with which gun use should not be associated."

With this logic in place, I am assuming the federal government will also restrict sales of firearms to those who consider alcohol their drug of choice.

Robert Todd

Jamaica Plain

[end]

Most of the 13 members of the Boston City Council who voted in favor of an Allston medical marijuana dispensary were former consulting clients of a businessman lobbying for the company, raising questions about the influences on the city's oversight of its fledgling medical marijuana market.

The businessman, Frank Perullo, was president of Sage Systems from November 2002 until the company closed in April 2015. Eight current city councilors hired Sage to provide various types of political consulting work during that period.

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It may have taken a frightening surge in opioid abuse to speed action, but Massachusetts now has a user-friendly online system for keeping track of drug prescriptions. The state monitoring program went live last week, after a $6.2 million overhaul of an unwieldy system that many doctors avoided like a virus.

The new one is simple and fast. It pulls in real-time data from prescriptions written for controlled substances, including widely used opiates like oxycodone and hydrocodone. Doctors, nurse practitioners, and other prescribers have to consult the database before writing such a prescription for any new patient, as well as when they give existing patients their first prescription for a controlled substance.

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