Back-to-back rulings by two Pennsylvania courts have torn a huge hole in the veil of secrecy shrouding the state’s nascent medical marijuana industry.

On Tuesday, a Commonwealth Court panel upheld the meat of an Office of Open Records order that requires the Department of Health to provide a PennLive reporter with the names and other information regarding those who are running and financing the successful applicants for medical marijuana growing and dispensing permits.

That ruling comes on the heels of the state Supreme Court’s decision not to disturb another OOR order requiring the Health Department to provide PennLive reporter Wallace McKelvey with information on the identities of members of a panel that reviewed the first applications for medical marijuana permits.

Health Department officials appealed to the state’s highest court after Commonwealth Court backed the OOR ruling on the application reviewer information last September. The first sales of dry leaf marijuana began in Pennsylvania in August 2018.

“These are two crucial steps forward in ending the secrecy surrounding medical marijuana in Pennsylvania,” Cate Barron, PennLive’s vice president of content, said of the dual court rulings backing release of the marijuana data. “While the Health Department should have led the drive for transparency in the industry – rather than fight it - we are grateful the courts saw the undeniable importance of making this information public.”

“It’s a major victory for the public and its right to know who is making decisions on grower and dispensary licenses and the stakeholders behind those applications,” she added.

Tuesday’s Commonwealth Court ruling allows the bulk of the OOR’s curbing of the redaction of the six successful marijuana applications to stand. The OOR found the Health Department went overboard in redacting that information after McKelvey requested it in 2017. Health Department officials based their redactions on documents that already had been censored by the applicants themselves, rather than examining the original applications, Judge Robert Simpson noted in the Commonwealth Court’s opinion.

Simpson’s court did permit a few extra redactions of the application information beyond those sanctioned by the OOR, but allowed the most important data regarding who is running and providing the financial backing for the burgeoning medical marijuana industry to remain public.

In finding that information must remain accessible, the OOR “recognized the importance of verification of principals, operators, financial backers or employees in this budding industry,” Simpson wrote.

So, he found, the OOR “struck and appropriate balance” in allowing the redaction of the specific residential addresses of those individuals, but requiring disclosure of their municipalities, states and zip codes.

Commonwealth Court allowed for an additional redaction of limited security information for one successful applicant, Terrapin Investment Fund 1 LLC, because that entity had provided documentation to support such a shielding.

The other five firms that challenged the OOR’s ruling – SMPD Manufacting LLC, SMPB Retail LLC, Cresco Yeltrah LLC, Mission Pennsylvania LLC and KW Ventures Hoilding LLC – did not provide such justification, Simpson found, but he agreed that “minimal” data regarding the placement of surveillance cameras in the facilities of those firms should be redacted.

Simpson also found the OOR should have allowed the redaction of trade secret information from Terrapin’s application regarding specialized growing and extraction techniques. The other applicants didn’t merit such consideration because they provided no evidence for protection their supposed trade secrets, he concluded.

However, Simpson rejected a Terrapin plea for even further redaction of hundreds of pages of information on a claim that it amounted to proprietary information. “The fact that the medial marijuana industry is extremely competitive does not substantiate Terrapin’s extensive redaction here,” the judge wrote.

Joshua D. Bonn, the attorney who represented PennLive and McKelvey in the open records fight, said Tuesday’s ruling “demonstrates that the presumption of openness is alive in Pennsylvania.”

“Government agencies cannot shield documents from public disclosure merely because a private entity says the requested information is a trade secret or confidential,” Bonn said. "Agencies have a duty to independently verify the veracity of such claims and must disclose records unless the private entity provides actual evidence supporting (an) exemption.”

Only the six marijuana firms appealed the OOR’s decision to Commonwealth Court. McKelvey and PennLive did not challenge the OOR ruling. The marijuana companies could appeal the Commonwealth Court’s decision to the state Supreme Court.

That tactic didn’t succeed in the dispute over releasing names of the marijuana application reviewers, however.

In that case, the Health Department appealed to the high court after Commonwealth Court rejected its argument that the names of the reviewers should remain secret to shield them from threats and bribes. Commonwealth Court found that argument too “speculative” and upheld an OOR order to release the names.

The Supreme Court, in turn, upheld the Commonwealth Court and the OOR, by refusing to hear the health department’s appeal in the reviewer name release case late last month.