The San Diego City Planning Commission voted 3-2 on Jan. 20 to recommend to the City Council a new ordinance placing harsher restrictions on where medicinal marijuana cooperatives can operate. The ordinance, if passed by the City Council, will limit dispensaries to five specific industrial and limited commercial zones. It also states that dispensaries must be located at least 1,000 feet away from schools, playgrounds, libraries, childcare facilities, youth facilities, churches, parks and other dispensaries. If the ordinance is ultimately adopted, the impacts on medical marijuana dispensaries in the Peninsula area are, as yet, undetermined. There are currently 180 dispensaries operating within the city. If the ordinance takes effect, there will be a possible 97 parcels available to dispensaries within the five legal zones. That number, however, is highly misleading, said Eugene Davidovich, a spokesman for San Diego Americans for Safe Access. Davidovich said because of the difficulty in finding sympathetic landlords — in addition to the new restrictions — there will likely be only a handful of dispensaries allowed to legally operate. Planning Commission Chairman Eric Naslund, who cast one of the dissenting votes, agreed. “I want to make absolutely certain that it isn’t so overly restrictive that it becomes an outright ban, and I think that that’s where the present ordinance is heading,” he said. Commissioner Tim Golba echoed Naslund’s thoughts, though he eventually voted in favor of the recommendation. “Even at 97 parcels, that’s pretty restrictive if you assume half of those are either not available or landlords wouldn’t even consider renting to it,” Golba said. “Now we’re down to 50 sites in the whole city that would be applicable. That’s probably overly restrictive in anybody’s eyes.” One thing most advocates of medicinal marijuana agree on is that if 180 dispensaries are condensed down to a handful, the majority of sales will return to where they were prior to the 1996 decision that made medicinal marijuana legal: the street. “I have patients who are very ill, who already take the bus and they’re not going to be able to go halfway across the county,” said Brian Wilcox, who operates a cooperative in La Jolla. “They’ll just have to get it on the street.” Dr. Igor Grant, a professor, physician and director of the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of California, San Diego, said regulation is of utmost importance, but it’s equally important that the public accepts marijuana for its properties beyond what has been illustrated in “Reefer Madness.” “We need to come to a place where marijuana is treated like a medicine but also regulated like a medicine,” he said. “There are many medications that have harmful side effects and may be habit-forming, like sleeping pills, but we use them and regulate them and take advantage of their benefits. Yes, marijuana has some harmful properties, but it also has beneficial properties, and patients who are not benefiting from other treatments can benefit from this one.” Wilcox, who has seen dispensaries open solely for profit and not for the benefit of patients, would also like to see some regulation. “I agree wholeheartedly that some regulation and guidelines are needed, but politically, it’s still in its infancy. So that’s still years out,” he said. “We need more research and public support. It’s happening, but it takes time.”