As Springfield police officers shuttered a store handing out marijuana for "free" while charging an admission fee, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker acknowledged the state is in a "no man's land" four months after voters broadly legalized the controversial substance for adults who are over the age of 21.



In a Wednesday sit-down with the editorial board of MassLive.com and the Springfield Republican, Baker called incidents like the Page Boulevard store, which operated under the name Mary Jane Makes Your Heart Sing, "troubling."



Those types of situations "speak to the fact that we need to do this and get it done right and get it done in a reasonable period of time because we're sort of in this no man's land at this point," he said, referring to expected revisions to the new marijuana law.



"For all intents and purposes, that starts to be exactly the sort of thing that we should be working to avoid," he added, pointing to the Page Boulevard store.



"That violates literally the spirit, the intent and the actual language" of the new law, Baker said. The law went into effect December 15, 2016.



Under the new law, a person can gift up to an ounce of marijuana to another adult over the age of 21, but selling marijuana is illegal until licensed pot shops open, which isn't scheduled to happen until July 2018.



"Attempts to evade this...with delayed or disguised payments, contemporaneous reciprocal 'gifts' of money or items of value, or other sham transactions, will remain a criminal act," said a memo from the governor's public safety office released in December, when personal cultivation and home-growing provisions went into effect.

Massachusetts lawmakers are slowly pulling together legislation tweaking the new marijuana law while the state is in somewhat of a legal grey area between prohibition and legalization.

Potential changes could include a higher tax rate than the one currently enshrined in the law. The law calls for taxes of up to 12 percent.

Baker, who opposed the new law and unsuccessfully campaigned against it last year, said he hopes lawmakers send a marijuana bill revising the law to his desk in May.



Baker signed a bill in January 2017 delaying certain parts of the new marijuana law by six months, meaning retail shops would open in July 2018 instead of January 2018.



"Six months seemed like a reasonable period of time," Baker said.



But marijuana legalization advocates howled in protest, saying the law passed by voters laid out a doable implementation timeline that worked for Colorado and other states.

Baker told MassLive/Springfield Republican that officials in Colorado and Washington, in conversations with his administration, said they would have liked more time to implement marijuana legalization after voters signed off at the ballot box.

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"They felt like they never caught up, that they were constantly playing catch-up with the industry and the market and what was going on generally, and they all said 'you know we would've loved to have had a little more time to try to get this right coming out of the gate in the first place,'" Baker said.



The editorial board asked him about comments from White House spokesman Sean Spicer suggesting "greater enforcement" of marijuana laws. President Trump's attorney general, Jeff Session, is an opponent of legalized marijuana.



Marijuana remains illegal under federal law.



Baker said so far there have been a couple of "offhand" comments, but nothing official from the Trump administration.



Unless the federal government tells them to go in another direction, Baker said, state officials plan to keep implementing marijuana legalization.