It was clear from the moment John Collins, the director of the state Office of Medical Marijuana, refused to answer questions about the state’s application scoring process and a rash of other topics that the launch of the state’s medical marijuana program was not likely to go as smoothly as officials were projecting.

The growing concern now is how applicants spurned by the Department of Health might choose to pursue legal remedies. PennLive reported Friday that 72 grower-processor applicants and 69 dispensary applicants appealed the state’s denial of their applications. Those challenges could sidetrack what appears to be a very tight timeline for state regulators to launch the fledgling industry and begin doling out the next round of permits. The newspaper also reported that there’s a proposal circulating among some losing applicants to begin a class-action lawsuit.

It’s possible that protracted legal battles over entrance into Pennsylvania’s medical marijuana industry were inevitable. Medical and recreational marijuana are, after all, among the nation’s newest and fastest-growing industries. With billions of dollars at stake, it’s reasonable to assume that investors are willing to do whatever it takes to get their foot in the door — including going to court to fight for the chance to be among the first.

The natural antidote to this kind of uncertainty is transparency. And instead of being forthcoming, state officials have done the exact opposite, hiding both the committee in charge of scoring the applications and the applications themselves behind a counterproductive veil of secrecy that clouds peoples’ ability to reach informed conclusions about the application process and dampens any effort to assure the public and applicants that it has been fair and free of improper influence.

In short, the state has set up its most promising new industry to be hampered by lingering questions about whether its own process was above-board, and uncertainty over whether legal challenges are in the making, how legitimate they might be, and how long they might take to resolve.

With federal officials signaling that they might seek to revive the adversarial policies that put marijuana retailers at risk despite state laws legalizing the drug, medical marijuana in Pennsylvania has enough to worry about without adding self-inflicted wounds to the mix.