During its January 19 session, the City Council is scheduled to revisit the issue of crafting a workable Medical Marijuana Ordinance for Long Beach. The City Attorney and his able staff have completed the latest revisions based upon recommendations from the Council and many, many members of the public, and the Council and the public are scheduled to consider and discuss these revisions during Agenda Item #16 (09-1203) on the 19th.
I encourage our readers to review all of the Agenda Items attachments by clicking here. Newly added to the list of attachments are eight different city maps intended to help us all to better visualize locations in the city where legitimate Collectives would be allowed to operate depending upon various “buffer” options available.
Here are some specific proposed revisions and my thoughts about them:
The proposed Ordinance requires an Administrative Use Permit (AUP) specifically for Medical Marijuana Collectives. Through this we could properly regulate these operations without requiring business licenses. So long as these operations are properly licensed and regulated (as none are that are currently in existence) I’m not particularly concerned about what we call the license.
The proposed Ordinance now allows for various edible medical marijuana products but the Collective must submit to inspections by, among others, our City’s Health Department and these products can only be produced on site and only for Qualified Patient Members of the Collective. I like this too.
The proposed Ordinance now requires exterior and interior photographs of the proposed property as part of the Permit process. This makes perfect sense to me.
The proposed Ordinance no longer requires Collectives to provide names, addresses or phone numbers of each member as a part of the application process, instead requiring this information only of any and all proposed “Management Members” for the Collective. This is a critical change because I think the prior version of the Ordinance was dangerously close to violating federal HIPAA laws designed, in part, to protect medical patient confidentiality.
Specific personal information about each member of the Collective must still be maintained on site, at the Collective, for a period of five (5) years but such records need only be made available to the Police Department for review or copying “pursuant to a properly executed search warrant, subpoena, or court order.” This change is also very significant and, I think, should go a long way toward assuring Qualified Patients that their privacy is a legitimate concern for the City.
Cameras must still monitor Collective properties at all times for security purposes but these need only be “closed circuit”, rather than “web based” cameras and recordings must be maintained on site for thirty (30) days. The previous requirements that these recordings “shall be made available…to the Police Department upon request” and that “Consent is given by the Collective under this Chapter to provide said recordings to the Police Department without requirement for a search warrant, subpoena or court order” have been rightly deleted. As with individual patient records, I have no problem whatsoever with requiring judicial review before such information is required to be disclosed to law enforcement officials. This is not to say that a Collective may not choose to voluntarily surrender some or at least portions of its recordings under specific circumstances, say, should it become the victim of an armed robbery or burglary, and its recordings could help the police bring the suspects to justice.
In fact, I would strongly suggest that any mention of “Police Department” in the proposed ordinance by amended to read “law enforcement official or agency” since, in truth, County Deputy Sheriffs, and State and Federal Agents do not work for or represent any “Police Department” and, so, could be seen to not be included in those sections.
Collectives would now be required to possess an Industrial Waste Permit from the L.A. County Sanitation District. This likely has to do with allowing the production and consumption of edible marijuana products on these properties and the requirement seems reasonable to me.
Medical Marijuana Collectives must meet all applicable South Coast Air Quality Management District rules and regulations; Los Angeles County Sanitation District rules and regulations; City of Long Beach Departments of Police, Fire, Health and Human Services, Development Services, Code Enforcement, and Financial Management rules, regulations, requirements and conditions; as well as all federal state and local laws to ensure that the operations of the Collective are consistent with the protection of the health, safety and welfare of the community, Qualified Patients and their Primary Caregivers, and will not adversely affect surrounding uses. This also makes perfect sense to me.
Collectives must still maintain a complete inventory of the medical marijuana cultivated and stored on site but the limits on the amounts of dried marijuana or number of plants that the Collective can possess has been removed.
The proposal gives existing collectives 90 days from passage and adoption to come into full compliance or immediately cease operations until such time as they do so. Given that each permit application requires a public hearing within 60 days, during which all property owners within 750 feet of the property in question must be provided advanced notice and given a chance to weigh in, I don’t know that 90 days will be enough of a grace period but the proposal allows for extensions for various reasons.
There are a lot of other proposed changes and I encourage our readers to review the entire document as linked above.
Overall I think the City Attorney’s Office has done an admirable job of considering and attempting to reasonably accommodate as many of the concerns brought forth by the Council and members of the public as would be lawful under the CUA and MMPA and other applicable codified and case laws.
Given the limits within which the City must work, I think this proposed Ordinance represents our best effort to date to accommodate the needs of legitimate medical marijuana patients and balance them with the reasonable concerns of the many other stakeholders in the community that are effected by the existence of Medical Marijuana Collectives.
That said, I maintain that the best and longest-term solution for this challenge in our society is to compel our Federal lawmakers to move marijuana from the Schedule 1 list of drugs so that it can be lawfully “prescribed” by licensed medical professionals, rather than merely “recommended”. Until we accomplish that change, any one of our locally licensed Medical Marijuana Collectives remains subject to raids by federal law enforcement agents. No local law (nor ill-advised Presidential policy) can fully immunize our Collectives from that risk. Only a change in the applicable federal laws can do so.
I very much welcome your questions and comments!