Saturday, 9 January 2016

MARIJUANA: Cities race to roll out rules for pot use

Worried about state deadline, many Inland cities ban growing pot, but a few allow patients to grow their own.


By ALICIA ROBINSON

Inland Southern California cities are scrambling to pass new rules governing medical marijuana to beat a March 1 deadline, after which they would lose control to the state.

It turns out they may not have had to rush. A bill to remove the deadline has already begun moving through state Assembly committees.

Nonetheless, the rules some cities have created suggest entrenched opposition to marijuana may be starting to weaken a bit. After spending seven years and more than $800,000 to shut down dispensaries, Riverside officials on Tuesday, Jan. 5, opted to allow medical marijuana patients to grow a handful of plants for their own use.

With the city’s ban on dispensaries and delivery services, “Every avenue of access has been cut off,” Riverside Councilman John Burnard said. “I think (to allow) growing as an individual for personal use and on a limited basis is very compassionate.”

But decisions by Riverside, Jurupa Valley and Riverside County to permit a few pot plants by no means herald a seismic shift. Most Inland communities already forbid dispensaries, and cities including Canyon Lake, Corona, Hemet, Menifee, Norco and San Jacinto recently extended the prohibition to cultivation of any amount of marijuana.

Menifee banned storefront dispensaries in 2011 and mobile delivery services in 2013, Mayor Scott Mann said, and “We felt the best thing to do for Menifee right now was to follow suit with our two previous bans.”

Mann and other city officials say the goal of their new rules was to maintain local control. But with a statewide marijuana legalization measure predicted for the November ballot, they’re not sure how long that control will last.

BEATING THE DEADLINE
California voters approved marijuana for medical use in 1996, but until now the state lacked a detailed system of regulation. The drug remains illegal under federal law.

Inland cities’ new marijuana rules were a reaction to a package of three state bills that create a regulatory scheme to license the growing, testing, processing and sale of the drug. One of the bills included a March 1 deadline by which cities must either pass their own rules for medical marijuana or cede regulatory authority to the state.

Legislators meant to remove the deadline, but a clerical error left it in the final bill, said Paul Ramey, spokesman for Assemblyman Jim Wood, D-Healdsburg. Wood wrote the bill that set the deadline.

Wood realized cities and counties would have very little time to craft their own rules, so he’s pushing a bill to eliminate the deadline, Ramey said.

Under the three bills, which were signed into law in October, if a city has no regulations on medical marijuana, someone wanting to grow or sell it could get a license from the state to do so. But a state license wouldn’t supersede a local pot ban.

That’s why Menifee, Corona and other cities added marijuana cultivation to their list of prohibitions, officials said.

“It’s really just a continuation of what we’ve already had,” Corona Councilmna Eugene Montanez said.

He and Mann, the Menifee mayor, said their cities may revisit the rules in the future. And, they added, while medical marijuana patients won’t be allowed to grow pot at home, they don’t have to go far to find it.

“There are ways for people to get their prescriptions filled. (Dispensaries are) all over the place,” Mann said. “They’re just not in Menifee.”

‘SORT OF’ VICTORY
But a few other local governments felt differently.

Riverside County passed rules in May 2015 mainly intended to end the nuisance of large-scale pot farms, but they created a de facto exemption for patients with a state medical marijuana card to grow small amounts at home.

“We were getting so many complaints from (residents) that they couldn’t open their windows because there were literally a hundred plants, two hundred plants growing in the backyard next to them, people armed (for security) at all hours,” Riverside County Supervisor Kevin Jeffries said. 

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