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The Department of Health is scheduled to select Hawaii’s first medical marijuana dispensaries by April 15, and the dispensaries will begin selling medical marijuana as early as July, marking a pivotal and historic moment. The Aloha State can either take this opportunity to create a vibrant new industry from scratch, or fail to look ahead and fall prey to the perils experienced by the states that have gone before us.

The chief peril for the fledgling industry is that each of the eight dispensary licensees will simply carve out a particular geographic niche and a comfortable patient base with a nice profit margin — and then stop. We have seen this approach time and again in Hawaii’s business community and it is not an unlikely future for Hawaii’s medical marijuana industry.

On its face this option is not without its appeal for the dispensary licensees. The Legislature created an oligopoly, so why not benefit from the advantages of the system to repay your investors and make some money?

And therein lies the chief danger of this approach: complacency. In a world with enough patients to go around and legislative barriers to new dispensaries, the current batch of licensees will have no incentive to improve the patient experience, cut costs to lower prices for patients, develop new techniques and medicines or otherwise push the industry forward to benefit Hawaii as a whole.

And this is the best-case version of a static oligopoly in Hawaii. The scenario rapidly worsens in a world where the patient levels are not enough to sustain the eight dispensaries, and they are forced to fight and cannibalize each other for revenue, creating competing fiefdoms that each hemorrhage money in an attempt to obtain market share while simultaneously failing to provide adequate care for the patients they are meant to serve and adequate security for the communities in which they operate.

Neither certifying more patients nor licensing more dispensaries will fix the underlying issue of a fundamentally oppositional industry where each of the eight major players is more concerned with short-term profit maximization than with the development of the industry as a whole. This failure to work together will drive up medicine prices for patients and place high costs on Hawaii’s economy instead of contributing to Hawaii’s future growth.

It is not often that a population recognizes the development or importance of an industry at its inception. In fact, it’s not very often that a new industry is introduced. But it would be an egregious injustice to ignore the future of an industry once we realize its potential.

So what is that potential? At the very least, Hawaii needs a profitable industry that provides good service and quality medicine to patients at an affordable price while discouraging diversion to the black market and gradually reducing any public stigma of the industry. But these should merely be the baseline goals of the industry – the lowest acceptable outcome.

At the very least, Hawaii needs a profitable industry that provides good service and quality medicine to patients at an affordable price while discouraging diversion to the black market and gradually reducing the industry’s public stigma.

We can do so much better for the patients, Hawaii and ourselves if we work together. We can forge a new medical marijuana economy that will reinvigorate Hawaii’s struggling agricultural sector, create a new global tourism market and attract investment from across the world for medical innovations. We can light a fire under our nascent technology industry, further incentivize renewable energy development and export a uniquely Hawaiian standard of care for the global industry.

But dispensaries alone cannot make this vision reality. It will take concerted support from all manner of adjacent industries across Hawaii to capitalize on our state’s strengths and build a true medical marijuana economy.

A first step is for the 59 different dispensary applicants to consider what they will do if they are not awarded a license in the first round of eight licenses. Fifty-one different companies that have compiled incredible teams of qualified, experienced people and millions of dollars in real and potential funding will not get to build a dispensary in 2016. Will they give up? Will they throw millions of dollars away in industry damaging lawsuits? Or will they pivot to other aspects of the marijuana industry – turning their expertise and funding to any of the multitude of profitable, tractable problems that this new industry faces?

Hawaii’s medical marijuana industry needs local banks, laboratories, research collectives, product development companies and consulting firms. It needs grow and manufacturing subcontractors for the dispensaries, education institutions, technology companies, waste disposal firms and any of hundreds of other potential services. Who better to create unique local solutions for the industry’s needs than the dispensary applicants and their teams of industry friendly experts and investors?

There is opportunity, risk and reward for all who step forward. If we do nothing, nothing will happen. Hawaii must choose whether we will let medical marijuana become yet another industry dominated by mainland interests, or whether we will take the steps necessary to create a medical marijuana economy that the rest of the world will emulate. Time is running short.