Pennsylvania took a big step forward on Tuesday, when officials rolled out the first 12 permits for grower-processors in the state’s fledgling medical marijuana industry.

It should have been a day to dig into the process like never before. With John Collins, the director of the state Office of Medical Marijuana, at the podium and the first round of application scores soon to be put on display, it was reasonable to expect significant new information about the process to come to light.

But the big take-away from Collins’ press conference didn’t come from the information he shelled out. It came from what he didn’t say, or refused to divulge — and that amounted to quite a bit.

The first hint that Collins’ briefing was about to go sideways came when he sidestepped a question about how the state’s application scoring system works.

By the time journalists started asking why the state wasn’t immediately making public the identities of the principal investors behind the grower-processor companies, observers should have been shaking their heads in dismay.

But the coup de grace was the revelation that the panel of experts who scored the grower-processor permits awarded on Tuesday is so secret that not even Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration knows who they are.

That may sound ridiculous to the point of absurdity, but it’s no laughing matter.

It’s certainly desireable to protect panel members from the efforts of lobbyists working on behalf of the marijuana industry. And by all accounts the industry’s efforts since the state legalized medical marijuana last year have been intense.

Erring on the side of caution is one thing, but Pennsylvania has taken that to the illogical extreme in this case. There’s simply no reasonable argument to support this level of secrecy. Not with regard to the details of the state’s scoring system; not with regard to the applications themselves — which are posted online but redacted to the point many are incomprehensible; and certainly not with regard to the panel of people charged with evaluating, scoring and awarding applications based on merit.

Plenty of other state agencies — the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, the Public Utility Commission, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board and others — wield considerable regulatory and contractual power and somehow still manage to conduct their business in full view of the public.

In fact, you could (and we do) argue that it is public scrutiny of such agencies that helps unmask ethical lapses and mismanagement, and ultimately prompts state officials to enact reforms.

In the absence of transparency and public scrutiny state officals, in this case, have signed affidavits from panel members swearing they are free from potential conflicts, and assurances for the public: “trust us, we’re trying to do this thing the right way.”

The problem is, the only way to truly ensure that this system is free from improper pressure and potential conflicts-of-interest is to commit to a transparent process that is subjected to public scrutiny from beginning to end.

That means unmasking the members of the permit review panel; it means being open and honest about how the state’s scoring system for applications works; and it means providing the public with full and complete copies of permits which have already gone through the system, so observers can draw their own conclusions.

In the absence of those measures, the state’s secrecy on medical marijuana amounts to nothing more than smoke and mirrors.