On Tuesday, June 19, the Long Beach City Council will discuss medical-marijuana dispensaries in Long Beach. And the next sound you hear is likely to be medpot’s last gasp in Long Beach. Except for the lawsuits.
On February 14 of this year the council passed a citywide ban on medpot dispensaries, but allowing a six-month exemption for approximately 20[1] that had been found to comply with the various hoops the City asked them to jump through over the course of the two years since first installing an ordinance allowing for their operation. Tuesday’s agenda item is to consider extending that exemption while the Pack decision — the impetus of the City repealing its original medpot ordinance — creeps closer to its review by the California Supreme Court.
But with a few exceptions, it appears no one’s seriously considering that extension.
At the time Councilmember Robert Garcia, who crafted the motion that led to the ban, pushed for six-month exemptions over the one-year exemptions favored by his council colleague Rae Gabelich, the City’s staunchest defender of medpot collectives, arguing that the shorter exemptions provided a better incentive for the collectives receiving them to operate within the spirit of the former medpot ordinance — the rationale being that if they behave, the council would be more likely to extend the exemptions.
But it appeared to many this six-month exemption was simply about giving collectives a chance to wind down their operations.
“If the objective of the council is to ban them all,” said Gabelich at the time, “then this […] six months is really just saying, you know, ‘Goodbye. You’ve got six months to close the door. We don’t want you anymore.’ So it’s really putting them out of business — it’s just giving them the opportunity to take six months to close down.”
That rationale for the exemptions was borne out by a comment made by Business Relations Manager Erik Sund last Tuesday. “The whole intent [of the six-month exemptions to 5.89] was that that six months was allowing them to phase out,” Sund told listeners at a breakfast held by the Good Neighbors of North Long Beach, “to slowly shut down their operations, since they were kind of already given the path to go that process.”
And when asked to comment on whether Sund’s take on the intent is correct, Garcia himself confirmed that it is: “Yes, that was the purpose of the six months,” Garcia says: “to allow them to phase out…to recoup some of their investment, and to give patients time to find new sources for medicine.”
That is shocking and disappointing news to the Long Beach Collective Association (LBCA), an organization comprised of a dozen collectives — all beneficiaries of the six-month exemption, which expires in August — with a mission to “[meet] the needs of patients through strict adherence to the laws of the City of Long Beach and the State of California, and the highest level of standards that preserve the integrity of the profession and all that it serves.”
Says Carl Kemp, an LBCA spokesperson, “There is nothing we have heard since February 14th that suggests that the six-month exemption was just to give us time to go away. That suggestion is interesting, at best. […] Our impression that we got based upon the motion at council, the extensive discussion behind the rail, and the questions between council and staff, was that the review [taking place June 19] would examine the compliance of the collectives [that received the exemptions], to review their good behavior — and that if there were no incidents requiring police action specific to those collectives, and at that point there had been no decision made by the [California] Supreme Court, those 18 collectives would be granted an additional six months, until such time as the Supreme Court rules on the Pack decision.”
Kemp notes that although the LBCA cannot vouch for the behavior of collectives that are not members of the association, LBCA members have voluntarily and consistently complied with the terms of the original medpot ordinance, even though it is no longer enforceable by the City.
“Our members follow a code of conduct that complies with the legislative intent articulated in the now-defunct 5.87,” he says. “We are still following the rules that the City doesn’t even have. Our patients are inconvenienced, but in good faith we are following the rules that [the City] was forced to do away with. So it seems to us that the onus is on the council, city staff, etc., to identify where we have gone astray [i.e., if the council does not extend exemptions], because we don’t believe we have. […] Why is it that our collective and members should be affected by an all-out ban if there is no new negative information [about LBCA members]?”
But in a May 18 memorandum sent to Mayor Bob Foster and the councilmembers, Long Beach City Manager Pat West claims just such a new development: that the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office will refuse to file felony charges against any Long Beach dispensary — including those operating for profit, and thus in violation of state law — while the City allows some dispensaries to remain open via temporary exemptions.
“[… T]he District Attorney has indicated that they will not file felony drug charges against any dispensary operator in the City as long as the partial exemption from the ban exists,” West writes.
However, the District Attorney’s office has told the Long Beach Post that West’s claim is false.
“It is not true,” said Sandi Gibbons, a public information officer for the DA’s office, after being provided with West’s quote and researching the matter.
But that probably won’t matter Tuesday. In what would seem to be a final coup de grace for medpot in Long Beach, Garcia will not be in attendance at Tuesday’s council meeting. That means before the summer is out any groups of more than three patients and caregivers cultivating marijuana for medicinal use will be criminals in the eyes of the City of Long Beach.
Ironically, it appears at present that the City’s ban is illegal. Just 15 days after Long Beach passed 5.89, the California Court of Appeal (4th District) unanimously ruledthat “an activity authorized by statute [in this case, the state’s Compassionate Use Act] cannot be deemed a nuisance,” and therefore “local governments may not prohibit medical marijuana dispensaries altogether.”[2]
It’s another case that will wind up before the state Supreme Court. But Tuesday comes first. And the little landslide of lawsuits likely to follow means that even if medpot dispensaries are closed down come August, their spectre will be around for a long time to come.
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