By James Lang
After six long years of hand-wringing and rancor, the Los Angeles City Council is poised to adopt a medical-marijuana dispensary ordinance by the end of the year.
But whether that ordinance will give patients and caregivers reasons to celebrate is far from certain. What began as a discussion on how many dispensaries to allow has evolved into a laundry list of regulations on everything from air-filtration systems to caps on caregiver compensation.
The council was set to meet after press time to decide just how many of the dozens of proposed regulations would be included in the final ordinance. But in a Nov. 24 meeting that ran the gamut between raucous and surreal, the panel indicated at least two key provisions would make it to the final draft: No more than 70 to 200 dispensaries would be permitted to operate in the city, and dispensaries would be allowed to provide medicine to qualified patients in exchange for cash “contributions.”
The decision to allow “cash contributions, reimbursements and compensation” in exchange for cannabis medicine represented a compromise of sorts between the council and the L.A. City Attorney’s office, which maintains sales at dispensaries are illegal under state and federal law. While plainly not pleased that the proposed ordinance doesn’t flatly ban state cannabis sales, Chief Deputy City Atty. William Carter told council members that including the word “contributions” puts the city on firmer legal ground.
“I would urge that we not support the sale of marijuana but we do support contributions to the collectives,” Councilman Richard Alarcon told his colleagues at the meeting. “To do otherwise would be thumbing our noses at the courts.”
Los Angeles is home to anywhere from 800 to 1,000 cannabis clubs, according to city officials. All but 186 opened after the city passed a moratorium on new dispensaries in 2007. A sense of extreme urgency hung over the Nov. 24 meeting, as council members insisted that further delay would lead to more dispensaries and more chaos.
That urgency to have an ordinance in place by year’s end resulted in council members publicly debating regulations they admitted to having first heard about only minutes earlier. The meeting began with the panel considering 23 separate amendments to the ordinance (the number was 16 a day earlier). By the time the meeting concluded hours later, the number had risen to more than 30.
Among the proposals that may yet make it to the final ordinance: Requiring all dispensaries to grow their own cannabis on the premises; capping annual compensation to caregivers at $100,000; requiring collective operators to attend regular meetings with LAPD and city officials; requiring unarmed collective security guards to patrol a two-block radius around the clubs during hours of operation; requiring regular, outside auditing of the collectives’ financial documents and medicine; requiring collectives to provide the names, telephone numbers, addresses and state medical-marijuana ID card numbers of patients; requiring all patients to possess state ID cards; capping the number of dispensaries a caregiver could own to one; forbidding anyone with a felony conviction from operating a collective; requiring twice-daily cash drops; requiring all collectives to conduct transactions only through credit or debit cards; requiring dispensaries to have no more than $200 on premises overnight; prohibiting dispensaries from operating next to a residential or mixed-use residential structure or within 500 feet of a school, public park, public library, religious institution, child care center, youth center or hospital; and requiring all dispensaries to install air-filtration systems so passersby wouldn’t smell cannabis.
The scope of the proposed amendments stunned Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who angrily commented that the council had strayed from its original mission.
“I can’t believe that we’ve gone from discussing compassionate care to going after the compensation of people running these facilities,” Hahn said. “This is just not our business. You’re taking one ordinance of one particular industry and trying to throw in the entire kitchen sink. It’s really a little bit disturbing, colleagues. Let’s just stay focused on what we’re doing to regulate these dispensaries.”
“With all due respect, Janice,” replied Alarcon, “I think we’re very focused on the issue.”
Several times during the meeting, Alarcon openly complained that a dispensary had opened on the floor beneath his office in Sylmar.
The haste with which the amendments were debated occasionally led to the bizarre spectacle of council members appearing less informed about what they were discussing than the 200-plus audience members watching them. When Council President Eric Garcetti asked how many of the “original” 186 dispensaries were still in operation and officials didn’t have a ready answer, an audience member—who described himself as a dispensary owner—called out, “120.” Garcetti thanked him for the information.
Much discussion focused on what Garcetti described as “the crux of what we’re here about”—how best to limit the number of dispensaries in the city. Among the proposals considered was limiting the number to one for every 57,000 L.A. residents and capping the number to anywhere from one to six dispensaries per council district, police precinct or community planning area. The council decided to hold off on the cap issue until receiving more information from city departments, but agreed the number would range from 70 to 200.
The question of whether to whittle the current 800-plus number down through random lottery or by giving preference to the original 186 dispensaries was also deferred to a later date.
The council is expected to take up the ordinance again on Dec. 2.
