Medical Marijuana Task Force
By David Harvey
SDUN Reporter
The Medical Marijuana Task Force will present its recommendations to the San Diego City Council’s Land Use and Housing Committee on March 24 after nearly six months of deliberation and community outreach.
The Council formed the 11-member task force in October to propose regulations on land use and zoning for medical marijuana dispensaries. The action was in response to the DEA’s raid of more than 20 dispensaries in September, following a boom in medical marijuana storefronts throughout the city.
The task force was scheduled to present their report to the City Council for action in January but instead the Council voted 7-1 to refer the item to LU&H first, and asked for additional input from community planning groups, which had not heard the issue.
The task force’s suggestions include a permit process based on the number of customers the dispensary serves, requiring a dispensary to have on-site security and adequate lighting, limiting signage to two colors and the dispensary’s name, and restricting operations to 7 a.m.- 9 p.m.
The task force also is recommending that dispensaries should not be located within a 1,000-foot radius of schools, playgrounds or libraries and not within a 500-foot radius of other dispensaries.
According to Leo Wilson, chair of the Community Planners Committee, a consortium of planning group representatives, dispensaries do need to be regulated but the task force and City Council are taking the wrong approach.
“They started out with the wrong issues: things like lighting and distances,” Wilson said. “What type of non-profit [they should be], what is a collective, what is a collaborative – these should have been the first issues. What are we trying to regulate to begin with? The core issue is about the land use – how do you define it, how can you do it legally, how does it operate. They got into lighting and distances and hours of operation. They went backwards.”
It was concerns like Wilson’s that prompted District 3 Councilmember and LU&H chair Todd Gloria to delay the item to March 24.
“My objective for this meeting is to reach a consensus among committee members on the proposed land-use restrictions,” Gloria said. “I look forward to intelligent input from all stakeholders and a productive conversation with my committee colleagues.”
About half of the city’s 50-plus planning groups have drafted motions in response to the proposed regulations. Several others will vote on the issue in late March and April, Wilson said. According to a CPC document that lists all the planning group motions, most want to see tighter dispensary restrictions than the task force recommended.
“Each community is sort of coming forward with a different idea. There’s sort of a common thread going through them all but they also diverge on a lot of issues,” Wilson said.
What the CPC and task force do agree on is the need for regulations. Although California voters passed Proposition 215 in 1996 to legalize the sale and use of marijuana with a doctor’s recommendation, the law did not include guidelines for how the dispensaries were to be operated.
“[Prop 215] is a very poorly drafted ordinance,” Wilson said. “Nobody knows right now what the distinction is between [operating a dispensary] legally or having law enforcement knock on your door the next day. This is about the worst possible way of enacting legislation.”
Since the law passed, nearly 200 cities in California have banned dispensaries. according to the Coalition for a Drug Free California. At least 35 cities have also passed ordinances to further regulate the medical marijuana industry. Meanwhile, unregulated cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego have become epicenters for dispensary growth.
“In Los Angeles, the City Council delayed action on the issue for a couple of years and ended up with hundreds, if not a thousand, medical marijuana dispensaries,” said Stephen Whitburn, vice-chairman of San Diego’s Medical Marijuana Task Force. “We don’t think it would be appropriate to have unregulated proliferation of medical marijuana dispensaries in San Diego.”
Kim Twolan, director of the Mother Earth collective, a medical marijuana dispensary in Mission Hills, said she is concerned the new L.A. ordinance that limits the number of dispensaries allowed in the city will drive less reputable owners to open up shop in San Diego, and that without regulations in San Diego, the problem will only grow.
“With what’s going on in L.A., cutting [the number of allowed dispensaries] down to 70, a lot of them seem to think that there’s a green light in San Diego, so you see a lot of the L.A. clubs coming down here and opening up and they’re not really helping,” she said.
While not all San Diego dispensaries are officially licensed by the city, an Internet search showed there are at least 20 dispensaries in the Uptown area and more than 90 in the city.
