The eight licensed medical marijuana dispensaries in Oakland, California have banded together to limit the number of dispensaries in the city in a bid to consolidate their grip on the legal marijuana market.

A document obtained by BuzzFeed News shows that those eight dispensaries hired a lobbyist in July and last month announced that they would be forming the Oakland Dispensary Council to advocate on their behalf, raising questions about the extent of the cannabis industry’s growing spending power and political influence.

As legalization becomes more common, pot consumers are starting to pay more attention to the details of proposed regulatory schemes and who will profit from them. Last week, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly against a legalization initiative that would have given control of all commercial cultivation of cannabis to the same group of wealthy investors that bankrolled the campaign. Polls showed that a majority of voters in the Buckeye state support both recreational and medical marijuana, but 53% of voters felt this specific initiative was a “bad idea” because it created a “monopoly on growing marijuana.”

In Oakland, the existing dispensaries say offering an unlimited number of cannabis retail licenses could overwhelm city staff, oversaturate the market, and make it more difficult for the city to keep a careful eye on all of the shops. But some activists and industry observers say the existing dispensaries are only looking out for themselves.

“From an economic perspective, this has the same impact as if they did engage in unlawful collusion, because they’re coordinating their behavior in a way that makes consumers worse off,” Joseph Harrington, a professor of business economics and public policy at Wharton, told BuzzFeed News. “There’s always concern when competitors start talking that their discussions will spill over into something that is anti-competitive.”

The Mayor of Oakland and the city’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission support allowing anyone who qualifies to open a dispensary, and a plan like that could result in dozens of new dispensaries opening in the city.

But last month assistant city administrator Greg Minor presented a comprehensive cannabis licensing plan that would take a very different approach, capping the number of permitted cannabis retail operators at just 16, including delivery services.

At the moment, in addition to the eight brick-and-mortar dispensaries in the city, there are at least another 21 cannabis delivery services operating in a legal grey area.

The city council is expected to vote by early next year on the new cannabis plan, which also includes new licenses for cultivating marijuana plants and manufacturing end products, such as pot brownies or cannabis concentrates such as butane hash oil. None of those other types of licenses will have caps.

At recent meetings of the Cannabis Regulatory Commission, Minor repeatedly made reference to what the existing dispensary operators want when discussing what city policy should and will look like. When BuzzFeed News asked Minor how much influence the lobbyist hired by the dispensary owners had over his policy recommendations, he laughed and said, “None.”

But the dispensary owners themselves were a different story .“I think [the existing dispensary owners] have wisdom to share,” Minor said. “The reason for not having an unlimited number is because it’s worked. We have these successful operators that are highly compliant with operating standards.”

Both potheads and activists tend to loathe anything that resembles what they see as “Big Pot”—that is, a marijuana market dominated by corporations wielding influence over those in power to shape the new cannabis landscape to benefit themselves, not the consumer. But the line between which cannabis businesses can truly be considered small and which are “corporate” is quickly blurring. Even marijuana businesses backed by wealthy investors and operating in several states seek to dispel the “Big Pot” label, lest they alienate their customers.