Pot company’s claims lead to a state inquiry over medical marijuana licensing rules

A top West Coast marijuana firm has been asked to produce records to the Wolf administration in what amounts to a compliance check on whether it is keeping to rules designed to keep one firm from dominating Pennsylvania’s medical marijuana market.

The state Health Department has asked Harvest Health & Recreation Inc. to supply any correspondence and other records between the Tempe, Ariz.-based firm’s headquarters and each of seven Harvest-related entities granted dispensary licenses here in the last two years.

Harvest Health created seven separate companies — most of them limited liability companies with different ownership groups — to hold dispensary licenses in regions around the state. All list the same group of officers, and the same home address in Tempe, though that template is used by many of the dispensary license applicants.

The state’s attention was re-focused on Harvest Health by an April 9 press release in which Harvest Health announced its planned acquisition of CannaPharmacy Inc., a company with a medical marijuana presence in several Mid-Atlantic states.

Harvest Health said then that the acquisition, if approved by the necessary state regulators, would allow it to add a grower/processor facility in Reading that was originally licensed to Franklin Labs, a group including one-time Wolf Policy Secretary John Hanger.

On the state’s books, Franklin Labs is still the nominal holder of the Pennsylvania grow license, though in its initial filings with Health, two of Franklin Labs’ principals were listed as indirect shareholders of the company through CannaPharmacy. [Read More @ WITF.org]