At a glance
Where the market is heading
Dispensary sales is the Department of Health's own retail column, and its footnote calls it gross sales from dispensaries to patients and caregivers completed during the calendar quarter. Wholesale transfers is the grower/processor side of the same workbook — a different tier, shown for scale rather than as a second measure of the retail market.
Quarterly dispensary sales
Pennsylvania publishes quarters, and only quarters. A monthly bar chart exists inside the Advisory Board's slide deck and is not published here — its quarters disagree with this workbook by far more than reading the chart could account for, and the state file records the measurement under integrity.chart_vs_workbook every time this page is rebuilt.
The wholesale line is not a check on the retail line. It is a different tier of the same market, and only one of the workbook's two wholesale column-pairs is carried here — the state file's integrity.duplicate_wholesale_banners entry says why, and measures it on every run.
The first quarters look odd because they are. Dispensary sales began in February 2018 and dispensaries stocked shelves before they sold from them, so the earliest quarters show wholesale above retail.
Patients and practitioners
These are stocks read on a date the Advisory Board states, not quarterly totals and not quarter-end counts. The Board meets on no committed schedule, so each reading is keyed to the quarter its own date fell in and a quarter with no meeting is drawn as a gap rather than a repeat of the previous reading.
Active certifications and approved practitioners
Certifications are not registrations. The Board publishes both: a count of patients holding a current certification, and a programme-to-date total of everyone ever registered. The second only ever rises and is not a measure of who is buying.
The series starts where the decks become readable. The older editions are image-only scans with no extractable metrics page, and they are excluded rather than dated from their filenames.
How many operators
Counts of permits in operation on the Board's stated date. The state's open-data portal also publishes a dispensary list; the two do not agree and neither publishes a definition of what it counts, so the state file carries the portal figure as a labelled cross-check and never averages the two.
Operational dispensaries and grower/processors
Both counts move in both directions. A permit can stop being operational as well as start, and the source publishes the count rather than the change, so a fall here is the Board's figure and not a parse error.
Dispensaries and licences in Pennsylvania — 181 with a published opening date, from Pennsylvania Department of Health.
Where these figures come from
Sourcing, basis and comparabilityPennsylvania runs a medical-only cannabis programme created by Act 16 of 2016. There is no licensed adult-use channel, so every dollar on this page is a medical dispensary sale and there is no split to draw.
Basis — Gross retail sales by dispensaries to patients and caregivers, per calendar quarter
- Measurement
- measured
- Money
- gross
- Tax
- unstated
- Period
- calendar_quarter
- Scope
- retail_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- medical
- Rounding
- Mixed. The workbook serves whole dollars in some quarters and cents in 21, in the retail Dollar Value column this block describes.
The regulator's own words: Workbook footnote, cell I2: “**Reflects total of all gross sales of medical marijuana products (in eaches and corresponding dollar value) from Dispensaries to patients/caregivers completed during the calendar quarter.”
Why an axis above reads unstated: A checked negative. A search of the 31,165 characters of the programme page's visible text and the workbook's banners and footnotes this pipeline fetches, for eight terms covering the axis, returned 2 matches for excluding (2). An undocumented basis is a gap to be labelled, never filled in with the most likely answer.
Basis — Transfers from grower/processors to dispensaries, per calendar quarter
- Measurement
- measured
- Money
- gross
- Tax
- unstated
- Period
- calendar_quarter
- Scope
- wholesale_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- medical
The regulator's own words: Workbook footnote, cell I1: “*Reflects total of all transfers of medical marijuana products (in eaches and corresponding price/cost) from GPs to Dispensaries completed during the calendar quarter.”
Why an axis above reads unstated: A checked negative. A search of the 31,165 characters of the programme page's visible text and the workbook's banners and footnotes this pipeline fetches, for eight terms covering the axis, returned 2 matches for excluding (2). An undocumented basis is a gap to be labelled, never filled in with the most likely answer.
Basis — Programme counts as read on the date the Advisory Board's deck states
- Measurement
- measured
- Money
- not_applicable
- Tax
- not_applicable
- Period
- point_in_time
- Scope
- all_tiers
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- medical
The regulator's own words: Every deck heads its metrics page “Program Metrics as of <date>”, and that date is what each figure is read on. The newest is 2026-06-01. The page counts both tiers of the supply chain under that heading - grower/processors and dispensaries - so these are programme-wide counts and not a retail subset.
Basis — Dispensary facility records in the state open-data portal
- Measurement
- measured
- Money
- not_applicable
- Tax
- not_applicable
- Period
- point_in_time
- Scope
- retail_only
- Geography
- statewide
- Channels
- medical
The regulator's own words: A facility list with one row per dispensary and an `open_on` date, so it covers the retail tier and no other; what the portal does not publish is a definition of which dispensaries qualify for a row, which is why its count and the Board's are shown side by side and never averaged.
Sources 2
| Role | Source | Format | From | Last verified | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canonical | Aggregate MMO Transaction Data Pennsylvania Department of Health | xlsx | 2018-Q1 | 2026-09-05 | One sheet, 34 rows, 13,500 bytes at a constant URL. The two wholesale banners carry identical figures in 34 of 34 quarters, so they are one measurement printed twice and neither checks the other. |
| Cross-check | Medical Marijuana Dispensaries (data.pa.gov) Commonwealth of Pennsylvania open data portal | socrata | point-in-time snapshot only | 2026-09-05 | Never averaged with the canonical figure. The open-data extract holds 181 dispensary rows against the Board's 196 operational dispensaries - 15 rows below, 7.7% of the Board's count. Neither source defines what it counts, so they are shown side by side and never averaged. |
Why each marker above says what it says
| Metric | Marker | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Retail sales | Partly comparable | Pennsylvania publishes quarterly and nothing else in numbers. DECISIONS Q4 forbids interpolating a quarter into months, so this line joins the quarterly view only. The figures are gross retail by the regulator's own wording; whether they include sales tax is not stated anywhere in the workbook. |
| Medical / adult-use split | Single-channel market | Pennsylvania is a single-channel medical market. Act 16 of 2016 created no adult-use channel and none has been licensed, so a medical share of one hundred per cent is a statement about the law and not about what patients buy. It is not comparable with a medical share measured inside a two-channel market. |
| Price per gram | Not like-for-like | Nothing to price. The workbook counts eaches - packages - and not weight, so no per-gram price is derivable from it. The deck's dry-leaf curves are chart marks with no exact figure to check them against, and ANCHORS forbids converting a per-package price into a per-gram one. |
| Per capita | Partly comparable | Every flag on the numerator rides along: the figure is gross by the regulator's wording, its tax treatment is unstated, and it is quarterly, so a per-capita comparison against a monthly jurisdiction has to be made on quarters. Pennsylvania is medical-only, so this is spend per resident in a market only certified patients may buy in. |
| Patient counts | Partly comparable | An active stock, which is the same measure Maryland publishes and a different one from the District's cumulative registrations. The caveat is the timing rather than the measure: the Advisory Board meets on no committed schedule, so these are readings on irregular dates keyed to the quarter each fell in, and 2025-Q1 inside the published span carries no reading at all. |
| Licence counts | Partly comparable | Counts of permits in operation on the date the Advisory Board states, not on a quarter end. The open-data extract holds 181 dispensary rows against the Board's 196 operational dispensaries - 15 rows below, 7.7% of the Board's count. Neither source defines what it counts, so they are shown side by side and never averaged. |
| Tax revenue | Not like-for-like | Pennsylvania publishes no cannabis tax series. Medical cannabis is exempt from state sales tax and the five per cent gross-receipts tax on grower/processors is not broken out in any recurring publication this pipeline can reach. |
What is checked on every run 3
| Check | Kind | Last result |
|---|---|---|
| The workbook prints the grower/processor sale and the dispensary purchase under two banners. They are asserted equal, because they have never differed. | identity | Pass. The two wholesale banners carry identical figures in 34 of 34 quarters, so they are one measurement printed twice and neither checks the other. This check corroborates nothing about retail; it exists so that the day the two columns diverge, the page stops describing them as one measurement. |
| The Advisory Board's monthly bar chart, summed into quarters, against the workbook's exact quarters. This is the gate that decides whether a monthly series may be published at all. | cross source reconciliation | FAIL, and the monthly series is withheld. Summed into quarters and set against the workbook, the chart misses by 6.165% at worst (2023-Q4, above) across 25 quarters tested, 46x more than the largest disagreement two editions of the deck show over the same quarter. 17 of the 25 quarters tested sit outside the band, and the residual is positive in 16 and negative in 9, changing sign once in period order - a scatter of reading errors does not do that. The chart is drawn with vector rectangles this extractor can read in five of the 22 editions on the programme page. |
| There is no independent decomposition of Pennsylvania's retail total to check it against. | unchecked | Not cross-checked. The workbook publishes one retail row per quarter and no product, county or channel breakdown that could be summed back to it. The wholesale columns are a different tier, and the two wholesale banners are the same measurement twice. Unlike the District, whose headline is over-determined by two in-document identities, Pennsylvania's headline is asserted by one column in one file. |
The regulator's own notes, and what is still open
The regulator's own notes
Sales and wholesale dollars come from the Department of Health's Aggregate MMO Transaction Data workbook, 34 quarters from 2018-Q1 to 2026-Q2. Patient, practitioner and licence counts come from the Medical Marijuana Advisory Board's programme-update decks. — Pennsylvania Department of Health
Pennsylvania publishes quarterly. There is a monthly bar chart inside the Board deck and it is not published here. Summed into quarters and set against the workbook, the chart misses by 6.165% at worst (2023-Q4, above) across 25 quarters tested, 46x more than the largest disagreement two editions of the deck show over the same quarter. — Pennsylvania Department of Health
Open questions on this data
Unresolved definitional questions that gate something. Listed because a question nobody can see is a question nobody closes.
- Do the workbook's gross retail dollars include or exclude sales tax? Closing it needs: A Department of Health methodology note, a data request, or a definition published beside the workbook. Not by reasoning from Pennsylvania tax law - ANCHORS forbids filling an unstated axis from general knowledge.
- Why do the Advisory Board's chart and the Department's workbook disagree about the same quarters? Closing it needs: Confirmation from the Department of whether the workbook restates published quarters and the deck's chart is rebuilt from a fixed extract. Until then the monthly figures stay out of the file.