Pa.’s first audit of its medical marijuana program finds glaring problems

Ten years after Pennsylvania signed its medical cannabis program into law, state officials performed their first audit and found a number of problems.

The audit logged issues with the program’s complaint process, inspections of growing facilities, production plants and dispensaries, and how it notifies sites about violations.

The issues have been well known for years, cannabis industry experts and researchers said, and reflect easily fixable inefficiencies at the state level. They also noted that some dangers lurk in the state’s negligence.

“Inconsistent procedures may allow issues to go uncorrected and lead to unsafe conditions within facilities or products,” wrote auditor general Timothy DeFoor in a Sept. 9 news release about the report. The audit covered the 2024 year.

“Hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians rely on the program to be safe, secure and trustworthy, so it’s up to these regulators to ensure proper procedures are in place,” he said.

The commonwealth’s medical cannabis program encompasses 196 dispensaries and 33 growers and processors, as of June 1, 2026. More than 400,000 Pennsylvanians are active users of the program, and the bureau has logged nearly $10 billion in sales revenue since January 2020.

Along with the findings, the auditor general published nine recommendations for the Pennsylvania Department of Health to improve the bureau — including implementing standardized inspection checklists and formal standard operation procedures for all sites, as well as streamlining the process of filing complaints and violations.

“I firmly believe that the Commonwealth got much of the medical program right,” said Kent Vrana, director of the Medical Marijuana Academic Clinical Research Center at Penn State, a pharmacology professor and special adviser to the dean. “It’s a benchmark or a bar for medical programs around the country. What this uncovered, however, is that the execution was a little bit sloppy.”

The audit’s findings

Auditors looked at various aspects of the state’s medical marijuana program, from how it conducts internal investigations and files complaints to its enforcement policies when violations are reported. They conducted multiple interviews with Bureau of Medical Marijuana staff, reviewed the program’s standard operating procedures and observed staff conduct inspections of facilities.

The Department of Health lacks adequate controls to ensure that inspection and enforcement processes were consistently performed, DeFoor wrote, leading to a dearth of standardized inspection documentation, supervisors failing to review inspection documents, and dispensaries and growers left in the dark about what they need to reconcile to be compliant with the law.

Of the 82 dispensary inspection checklists the auditor reviewed, only half of dispensary owners said they received their checklists about what was inspected during the state’s visit.

Instead of providing dispensaries and growers with a standard inspection checklist that outlines what the bureau will be looking for, sites were encouraged to write their own checklists, said Meredith Buettner, executive director of the Pennsylvania Cannabis Coalition, the largest industry trade group in the commonwealth representing many of the medical cannabis organizations.