Turf Battles

Fighting the good fight at the local and state level—which is better?

As activists across California strive mightily to pass laws aimed at protecting access and patients’ rights, others are abandoning such efforts in favor of carrying their battle at the local or county level.

Bills aimed at legalizing medical marijuana dispensaries have popped up in cities and counties across the Golden State, such as in Orange County—Costa Mesa and Santa Ana, for example—and San Diego County, such as the cities of Del Mar, Encinitas, La Mesa, Lemon Grove, Imperial Beach and Solano Beach. Officials in Needles, a tiny San Bernardino County city in the Mojave Desert, are considering a 10-percent tax on cannabis sales.

Kandice Hawes, president of Orange County NORML, says she launched the Santa Ana initiative drive after officials there began fining dispensaries—and the property owners who rented space to them—for code violations in an effort to force every outlet in the city to shut down.

“The city’s intention is to get rid of every collective through code enforcement, dragging operators into hearings and, if they continued to operate, into Superior Court,” says Hawes. “There are only three cities in all of Orange County with safe access left. We want to make sure there’s at least one city with safe access.”

Hawes joined forces with Marla James, president of the Orange County chapter of Americans for Safe Access, to create the Committee to Support Medical Marijuana Ballot Initiative. The group has been steadily gathering signatures since February to qualify a measure that would allow up to 20 dispensaries in the city operating under a tight set of regulations. All cannabis sales would be taxed an additional 2 percent, with proceeds going straight into Santa Ana’s general fund.

If the measure is successful, Hawes says, the committee will then turn its attention to the OC cities of Lake Forest and Huntington Beach.

In Costa Mesa, petition circulators have about four months left to reach their goal of 15,500 voter signatures—more than three times the number actually needed to qualify a measure that would repeal the city’s five-month-old dispensary ban. According to petition manager Weston Mickey, a Chico-based activist who previously worked on local medical cannabis laws in Northern California, the initiative would also make it a crime for city officials to collude with federal authorities in trying to deny patient access to cannabis medicine.

“We’re going to force a special election in the city,” says Mickey, whose initiative was launched in February by former collective owner Robert Martinez. “The Costa Mesa council spent $500,000 to try to shut down all the dispensaries in the city, and, after getting their asses handed to them, called on the feds to intervene as a way to ignore the provisions of Proposition 215. Our initiative would make it a crime for city and federal officials to collude in virtue of medical marijuana laws.”

Wishful Thinkin‘?

The sheer number of pro-medical marijuana measures working their way toward city and county voting booths might suggest that advocates are hoping to achieve protections at the local level that they so far have failed to pass in Sacramento. That, says activist and union organizer Matthew Witemyre, could prove to be wishful thinking. “Look at what’s happening in cities with really good medical cannabis ordinances in place,” Witemyre says. “Oakland has what many consider the best program in the state, and what happened? The feds raided Oaksterdam, for God’s sake—the flagship dispensary in the most access-friendly city in the state got shut down.”

“Until we get statewide regulations and officials willing to stand up to the feds, we’re going to continue to lose this—we’re losing the war,” he adds.