Department of Health’s Decision to Permit Discounts on Medical Marijuana Paying Dividends for Low Income Patients

Cost is an issue for some Pennsylvania medical marijuana patients, and so far dispensaries have been able to do little to help. That changed this week as the Department of Health announced in an e-mail to dispensary owners that it would begin to allow discounting with prior approval.

The move puts the state in line with most others, many of which allow for discounting for certain types of patients including military and low-income. While the new discounting policy likely still prohibits “sales,” it is a welcome change for some patients who were locked out of the market due to price.

Only two dispensaries are currently offering discounts: Columbia Care in Scranton and Mission Pennsylvania in Allentown. In both cases, the patient must be on Social Security, Disability, or Medicare, be a veteran, or be over 65 years of age.

It is expected that some type of discount program will become available in just about every dispensary in the coming weeks, but exact timing is unknown. It appears that each dispensary must file its discounting plans for the state individually and await approval before offering it to the customer, even if similar discounts have been already approved for other dispensaries.

Also unknown is whether or not a dispensary could request to offer a discount for “volume” buys, but given the state’s previous reluctance to allow any discounting at all, it’s likely such a request would be denied.

The discounts will help some low income patients. Hoewever, even with as much as 20% off the retail price as Mission is offering, concentrates still run close to $50 a gram, and eighths of some of the cheapest strains around $30. This might not be cheap enough for some of the program’s poorest.

For these patients, Act 16 did provide for a system to be set up to offer assistance to pay for the drug. So far no such program has materialized, nor has any timeline been announced — a disappointment to many low-income patients. They argue that is the only way they are able to participate.

Pennsylvania’s Advertising Regulations Still Strict

While the change in discounting regulations is welcome, Pennsylvania’s advertising policies when it comes to MMJ still remain fairly strict in comparison to most states.

The issue was apparent in the first days of the program, as dispensaries would only make their menu and prices available in store, angering some considering early prices were quite high. Menus and prices however leaked out onto social media groups however , and the DOH later permitted dispensaries to post their menus to their own websites, but not aggregation sites like Weedmaps and Leafly.

Only one Pennsylvania dispensary — Justice Grown of Edwardsville — posts its menu to Leafly with prices (Liberty posts its menu without price information on Weedmaps), and it’s unclear whether the practice is actually permissible under current DOH regulations. Critics argue that the practice actually allows for less price transparency for patients, making ‘price shopping’ difficult to do, and like the early ban on discounts, might be artificially keeping prices up.