---
title: "Deb Goldberg Fired a Cannabis Regulator, and Now It’s Her Job on the Ballot"
description: "The Massachusetts treasurer spent about $1 million on legal fees, lost in court, and now faces a $3 million suit and a Republican challenger"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-11T10:00:00Z
modified: 2026-10-11T20:48:15Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/deb-goldberg-fired-a-cannabis-regulator-and-now-it-s-her-job-194c01
language: en
tags: ["politics", "cannabis", "corruption", "elections", "treasurer", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Deb Goldberg Fired a Cannabis Regulator, and Now It’s Her Job on the Ballot

*The Massachusetts treasurer spent about $1 million on legal fees, lost in court, and now faces a $3 million suit and a Republican challenger*

By Nate Ledger · October 11, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/deb-goldberg-fired-a-cannabis-regulator-and-now-it-s-her-job-194c01

## In brief

- Massachusetts Treasurer Deb Goldberg, a three-term Democrat, faces Republican Elizabeth Dionne in her reelection bid
- A judge ruled Goldberg’s 2024 firing of cannabis commission chair Shannon O’Brien unlawful; her office spent about $1 million on fees
- The Legislature later restructured the commission, ending O’Brien’s tenure and stripping the treasurer’s appointment power
- O’Brien filed a $3 million lawsuit against Goldberg and the commission in August; it is still pending
- No Republican has unseated a Democratic incumbent for a Massachusetts constitutional office since 1952

Here is a rule of thumb for American politics: if you are the state treasurer, and voters know your name, something has probably gone wrong. The treasurer’s job is to run things like the pension fund and the lottery, competently and quietly, and the ideal treasurer gets reelected by people who could not pick her out of a lineup. Deb Goldberg, the Massachusetts treasurer, has been very good at this. She is 72, a former Brookline local official whose family founded the Stop & Shop supermarket chain, and she has won three statewide races since 2014. She is already the second-longest-serving treasurer in state history, behind only the late Robert Q. Crane.

And yet, as [Chris Van Buskirk reports in the *Boston Globe*](https://bostonglobe.com/2026/10/11/metro/goldberg-dionne-treasurers-race-cannabis-controversy/), people are now asking her about something other than the pension fund. Specifically, they are asking about Shannon O’Brien.

The short version goes like this. In Massachusetts the treasurer used to appoint the chair of the Cannabis Control Commission, the state’s marijuana regulator. Goldberg appointed O’Brien. Then in 2023 Goldberg suspended her amid accusations that she had made racially insensitive comments, and in 2024 she fired her. The catch is that you cannot fire a commission chair just because you have stopped liking her; the law requires a specific standard. Goldberg cited “gross misconduct.” In September 2025, Superior Court Judge Robert Gordon [ordered O’Brien reinstated](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/02/metro/shannon-obrien-cannabis-control-commission-wrongly-terminated/) with back pay, in a 50-page ruling that was not exactly kind to O’Brien’s leadership but was much less kind to the firing. “Even when granting the Treasurer’s fact-finding all the deference due it under the substantial evidence standard, and even considering the facts Goldberg found in their totality, her case for removal amounts to thin gruel,” [he wrote](https://www.wwlp.com/news/massachusetts/judge-reinstates-obrien-as-cannabis-commission-chair/), calling O’Brien’s remarks “concededly ill-considered” but well short of the legal bar.

![A judge’s gavel with a curved handle connects to a cream office chair bearing a green cannabis leaf against a teal background.](https://rews.cc/img/5ffa8bdcdf468394c15a7c4a4828312257630180.webp)

Goldberg’s office decided not to keep fighting, by which point it had spent roughly $1 million on legal fees. Goldberg now says the case had become a “distraction from the business at hand.”

Then the story takes a turn that I find genuinely funny in a structural way. O’Brien, having won her job back, lost it again a few months later anyway, because the Legislature rewrote the commission. Lawmakers stripped the treasurer of her power to appoint the chair and handed the governor the authority to name a new three-member panel. So the final scoreboard is roughly: O’Brien won the lawsuit and lost the job; Goldberg lost the lawsuit, spent about $1 million, and lost the power to appoint anyone to the job. Everyone lost something, which is one way of resolving a dispute.

Except it wasn’t resolved. In August, O’Brien [filed a $3 million lawsuit](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/21/metro/shannon-obrien-lawsuit-3-million-state-treasurer-deborah-goldberg/) against Goldberg and the commission in Suffolk Superior Court, claiming the firing tarnished her reputation. According to the *Globe*’s reporting on the complaint, it alleges retaliation under the state Whistleblower Act (against both Goldberg and the commission), a violation of the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act and invasion of privacy, and the $3 million figure doesn’t include the punitive damages and attorney’s fees O’Brien says she is also owed. The suit landed days before the state primary and is still pending. Tim Burke, O’Brien’s lawyer, says the timing was not political. “It is up for the court to decide what constitutes compliance with the law regarding termination, not Deborah Goldberg’s interpretation,” he said.

Add it up and the potential cost of this personnel decision is about $1 million already spent plus a $3 million claim on the table, or $4 million before anyone counts punitive damages. That is a lot of money for a fiduciary to spend on one employee, and the treasurer’s office is, among other things, the place where people go to learn about fiduciary duty.

![A cream safe with a dark blue door and cannabis leaf design spills gold coins onto a teal surface.](https://rews.cc/img/2821ab8ba055284d71dabe497607e3d1d2db25f3.webp)

Goldberg is admirably frank about the political damage. “Do I think it made me more vulnerable? Absolutely, because it got an awful lot of press,” she told the *Globe*, adding that the issue was hanging over the race “unfairly” and that reporters were asking about it “when we should be talking about all the great things that the treasurer’s office does.” She would rather discuss the office she created to help residents manage and build wealth, or her push for a trust program for newborns. She also has not entirely let go of the underlying argument. There is, she says, a “standard of behavior in leaders that I think most people expect today.”

> Now, I’m not saying Shannon because I will get sued for that, but I have certain standards. I come out of the business world. There are behaviors in the business world that there is just zero tolerance for today.

Translation: I am not talking about the person I am obviously talking about, because she has already sued me once this year. Sure.

Steven Grossman, the treasurer before Goldberg, was gentle about it. Goldberg has always “seen the job as being primarily a fiduciary” for the state, he said, and “sometimes politics get messy,” but the dispute “could have been handled more effectively, with less angst than it ultimately created.”

## Enter the challenger

Massachusetts Republican leaders recruited Elizabeth Dionne, 56, a lawyer and former Belmont Select Board member, to run against Goldberg. Dionne grew up in California and Utah, came east for Wellesley College in 1988, and is the daughter of John L. Harmer, a former California state senator who briefly served as lieutenant governor under Ronald Reagan. She has four children and has said she stopped practicing law to care for her son, who has autism. She says she is running over “corruption, cronyism, and chaos” in the treasurer’s office, and that O’Brien’s firing didn’t “pass the smell test in terms of due process and evidence.” Her credential here is local: “As a Select Board member, I know what it means to appoint commissioners who then have some independence, because we do that at the local level all the time.”

![A magnifying glass containing a classical government building symbol has a cream handle extending into the slot of a coral ballot box against a blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/9c517db9ce44cdb6fb790ae7db2e3d967ac86a78.webp)

Her weakness is also local. On the Belmont board she backed a property tax override, partly to close a budget gap, and pushed the town to comply with the MBTA Communities Act, a contested zoning law built around transit. That has drawn fire from her own town’s Republican Committee chair, Tommasina Olson, who credits Dionne with having “gotten good advice to go after weaknesses in Deb Goldberg” but doubts the fiscal pitch. “I’m sure the GOP party thought ‘taxpayers’ treasurer’ was a great moniker, but I’m not so sure,” Olson said of the campaign slogan.

Goldberg, for her part, told a rally this month that Republicans “picked a billionaire” to run against her. Dionne said this was “so delusional as to make me question \[Goldberg’s\] grasp on reality,” and added: “We didn’t have generational wealth, but we were able to build our own.” It is a little unusual for the heir to a supermarket fortune to lead with the wealth attack, but campaigns use what they have.

There are also two super PACs, one for each candidate, that so far haven’t raised or spent much but are sitting there in case a state treasurer’s race suddenly becomes worth buying. History says it won’t. Goldberg has the name recognition, more campaign money and the record: according to state election records, the last time a Republican beat a Democratic incumbent for one of Massachusetts’ constitutional offices was 1952, when the Democratic governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general all lost.

If Goldberg wins, this may be her last campaign. Only Secretary of State William F. Galvin, who is seeking a ninth term that he says will be his last, has held statewide office longer. “It’s unlikely that I will run in four years,” Goldberg said. “But Bill Galvin has said that, hasn’t he?”