About This Dashboard

Every completed compliance test in Illinois's regulated cannabis market, visualized and searchable. 100,647 packages across 42 named operators and 6 named labs. Sep 2021 – Feb 2026.

The data is Illinois's package-level cannabis testing record, obtained through a public-records request. The analysis, the license-class tagging, and the methodology are mine. The testing record is public — this site puts it in a form anyone can read, and names every operator and lab exactly as the state does.

Illinois did not publish this the way New Jersey publishes its testing data. We obtained it through a public-records (FOIA) request: the state's raw package-level testing files, every completed analyte result, with operators and labs named in cleartext. Nothing here is modeled or estimated. Where a judgment call was required — which records to count, how to deduplicate overlapping files, how to map a schema that changed mid-stream — it is documented in the methodology, including the things we are still verifying.

Illinois is the one state where this is possible: every operator in the record can be tagged to its license class. Illinois converted its 21 medical-program cultivation centers into the adult-use incumbent tier, then issued a separate, later, canopy-capped craft-grower license to open the market. The whole dashboard reads the testing record through that split — who produces the flower Illinois tests, quarter by quarter, incumbent versus craft.

The finding is structural, and it is about size, not safety. The two tiers pass within about a point of each other every year. What separates them is volume — a statutory canopy cap that holds craft to a fraction of an incumbent's footprint even at full expansion. The structure decided who could compete before anyone planted.

We would rather flag these ourselves than have you find them. Three matter most.

The record caught its own seam. In mid-2025, Illinois moved its tracking from BioTrack to Metrc. At that transition, the results from LK Pure — the lab that handled the incumbent tier almost exclusively, roughly 60% of all testing — fall out of the captured data. We can't tell from inside the dataset how much of that is a reporting-pipeline change and how much is real, so we don't guess. The craft tier barely used LK Pure; it tested at ACT and Steep Hill, whose reporting carried through intact. So we show the craft signal at full strength through the end of 2025, hold the all-lab and incumbent series at the first quarter of 2025, and mark the seam directly on the charts. A share read off the post-seam record would overstate craft. We won't show you that number.

Two sites and one lab record implausibly clean results. The largest incumbent cultivators by volume show near-zero failures across very high package counts — implausible for that volume. That is almost certainly a completeness gap in the public-records export, not a flawless production run. Their volume and potency are counted; their pass rates are treated as unverified and held out of every per-operator finding.

Some breakdowns the New Jersey dashboard carries aren't possible here. Illinois's record names every operator and its license class — richer than New Jersey in that one way — but it carries no failing-analyte field, no stability-test time series, and no strain or product-name fields. So the contaminant-level, stability, and strain views built for New Jersey are deliberately omitted here rather than faked.

The full list lives in the methodology.

I'm Max Jackson, founder of Cannabis Wise Guys.

Before I started analyzing cannabis markets, I operated in one. I worked on a licensed cannabis farm in Trinity County, California — first as a photographer documenting the operation, then as general manager running the whole on-the-ground business across 13,000 square feet of flowering canopy. I lived on-site in a converted ambulance and learned every lesson the hard way: undersized irrigation, failed automation, diesel generators at 3 AM, two hours from the nearest Home Depot.

When I read a state testing export today, I'm reading data I used to generate.

Today I work as an operational translator between cannabis operations, finance, and policy. I serve on the cultivation committee of a state cannabis trade association, consult on cannabis litigation as an expert witness, and publish market analysis that connects what operators experience to what investors and regulators assume. No party funded, directed, or pre-reviewed this dashboard. The analysis is independent.

Markets work better when participants see the same data.

Illinois issued 86 craft licenses to open its market. 20 ever appear in the flower testing record. The 21 incumbent cultivation-center sites still produce the overwhelming majority of tested flower. None of that was hidden — it was sitting in the state's own testing files, waiting for someone to clean them up and tag them to license class. That work is done. The result is on this site.

I built this because I kept citing Illinois testing data in policy work and realized nobody could verify what I was saying without doing the same multi-month data processing I had done. If the evidence matters, the evidence should be public.