Big Business has already taken over the PA cannabis market

The new year has begun with a flurry of activity. We have military operations happening in South America, the inevitable celebrity passings, and playoff football, at least on the national level of our country. Stateside, in Pennsylvania, Fluent started its 2026 with a sale! The sale of their dispensary license to Maitri Medicinals. This will likely be noticed by a small portion of the PA population, as Fluent only possessed one dispensary license. This license was good for three Fluent stores located in Mechanicsburg, Hanover, and Annville. So, if you are in the South-Central PA region, you will notice the Fluent stores start to transition towards a new front. The sale of this license itself is rather minor in all honesty; a small number of stores bought out in a small region of Pennsylvania. What this does show is Pennsylvania’s continuing lack of diversity in the cannabis market. Fluent did not have any of its own brands that were grown exclusively for them to sell in stores. However, it leaves two, maybe three cannabis companies that exclusively own dispensary licenses; every other PA dispensary license is backed by a grower processor. This leaves about twenty different companies with storefronts, which is not nearly enough diversity for a market spanning billions in revenue and possessing plants that could have a million variants or cultivars. Looking at it this way, it appears Pennsylvania Cannabis is already dealing with the issues of an oligopoly; companies continue to grow by buying out competitors, shrinking the pool of competition.  

Oligopolies, unfortunately, are a massive issue in many US markets. A small group of titans dominates American Auto, American Oil, and American Pharmaceuticals. Setups like this allow markets to be infiltrated by price-gauging, poor product quality, and an overall lack of care for products. The cannabis industry has been no exception to this, especially in the state of Pennsylvania. Consumers or “Patients” already commonly note poor flower quality and rushed processes in the completely “medical” market. Many have noted their grievances in online forums such as the PA medical marijuana subreddit and even in-store to dispensary staff, such as myself. Before working in dispensaries, I also worked in a medical marijuana grower and processor facility here in PA, and I can confirm everyone’s grievances are not only valid but true. Products are cheap, and processes are rushed. If all or other grows are similar to this, one could draw the inference that the medicine in PA is not actually treated as medicine but rather a cash crop. Cannabis flower consistently struggles to pass rigorous testing thresholds in Pennsylvania. Even when it does, most of the time it feels dry, looks meek, and offers very muted flavor notes. While age does play a part, and you won't necessarily capture the high of your teenage years, I can not discredit the older patients who say weed just used to be better. Your plug growing it in his house, in the 80s, probably cared a lot more than most of these corporate heads. Cannabis flower is only a small portion of the market, though. Examining some of the other products on the market, there is not a single inhalant that is stored or cared for properly. Vapes are often packaged in dinky cartridges and devices that leak and clog. Concentrates are left out of refrigerators when they are not supposed to be, and can be flipped and stuck on their sides. This can become a full product loss, as some concentrates move and leak out of the jars when left on their side. Cannabis flowers that fail testing for packaging have been proven to be extracted into a product that can pass testing. This product is often used as the base for topicals, tinctures, and, you guessed it, edibles. The problem here now is that the healthier and more beneficial edibles and ingestibles on the market are more expensive than the products generally used for catching a “buzz”.  Maintaining the oligopoly as it stands in the state would maintain the premise that better medicine comes with a higher price tag and is farther out of reach for average patients. With minimal competitors that seem to care about the medicine they grow and create, the Pennsylvania cannabis market not only looks to continuously decrease in quality and competition, but it will also eventually turn into a monopoly.

The simple solution to this problem in the Pennsylvania cannabis market would be to legalize and regulate the product. This solution, according to lawmakers, comes with incredible implications and difficulties. Taxing it would have to be figured out; the cannabis board would more than likely have to be restructured, and licenses would have to be made available again. Some of these problems could also be attributed to lawmakers and how the system was set up. Licenses in Pennsylvania were incredibly limited and came with a steep price tag. That price tag was about one million dollars in assets and one hundred thousand dollars in licensing fees. Not a price tag readily available for a “mom and pop” start-up business that may be more willing to take their time on processes and treat the plant as medicine. With licenses in the Pennsylvania market not being cyclical and already granted, many of the costs for licenses have far exceeded the values previously listed. Pennsylvania only has one company owned and operated by patients, and its operation is more of a brand change for a dying license rather than patients being able to start their own cannabis business. Adding licenses and making them cyclical through a regulated, more open market could prove to be beneficial not only to the cannabis market but also to the state. There could be tax revenue from product sales, as well as license holders or business owners. The tax revenue could be used for road maintenance, balancing the state budget, and other infrastructure additions throughout the state. There could also be an additional state revenue stream from licensing fees, especially if they were repetitive and cyclical. Jobs could be created when redoing the cannabis board, and for cannabis testing, administration, and even side sales, such as gardening supplies. Additionally, people could also be more inclined to help preserve and maintain natural land and green space. The last and biggest problem that could be solved would be getting the state’s cannabis as safe and as cheap as possible. While new legislation and additional licensing would hopefully bring the ability to grow at home for patients, it will hopefully flood the market with new tech and quality. Patients could care for their medicine as much or as little as they’d like, and those who would rather save themselves the trouble could get better medicine at a cheaper rate. A mass flooding of products could be just what the market needs to either run out the big corporations or bring their level of quality up tenfold.

While the Pennsylvania cannabis market has started the new year busy with the sales of licenses, lawmakers should pick themselves up by their bootstraps and get working on new legislation. The executive order could throw a slight wrench in things. At this point, it appears that the pros far outweigh the cons with a regulated recreational cannabis market. Oligopolies will only prove to slowly kill an already sluggish market. Without more licenses and competition, consumers will only continue to see subpar cannabis flowers and use pisspoor by-products. New licensees brought in at a cheaper rate could prove to be more beneficial in the long term. Slowly improving quality, dragging down market prices, and steadily adding to the state tax revenue and budget. Pennsylvania has long had a pattern of being late to the party with new legislation; at this point, the state is surrounded by states with recreational cannabis markets. It appears it may now be time for the commonwealth to re-examine and try to pass recreational cannabis legislation before federal legislation makes cannabis even more confusing. Either way, it is certainly better to be fashionably late to the party and enjoy it than it is to see the pictures later and wish you were there. Hopefully, Pennsylvania legislators will soon get out their Polaroids and be ready to show up to the recreational cannabis party. The consumers of cannabis and the cannabis market as a whole will certainly have immense amounts of gratitude for it.