By Christina Egerstrom
As of Jan. 1, Palo Altans will be able to buy marijuana by delivery
but it will be illegal to sell in stores. Five miles away in Mountain
View, retail sales will be allowed. Just a short hop over the Santa Cruz
Mountains in Half Moon Bay, farmers are preparing for the possible
commercial cultivation of marijuana plants.
When Californians
voted to legalize recreational marijuana in November 2016, it left it to
the cities to decide how they would regulate marijuana within their
borders, leaving a patchwork of local regulations that could make it
challenging for legal marijuana businesses to operate.
Proposition
64, or the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, makes cultivation, manufacture,
testing, storage, retail sales, deliveries and use of marijuana legal
unless otherwise stated by cities.
Most cities in San Mateo and
Santa Clara counties, like Redwood City, East Palo Alto, San Mateo and
Palo Alto have opted for more restrictive regulations despite most of
their residents voting for Proposition 64. Redwood City and Palo Alto
will only allow marijuana deliveries from licensed retailers and East
Palo Alto and San Mateo have opted for banning all cannabis related
operations.
“I think it should be legal in California but I don’t
want it in Palo Alto,” said Palo Alto Mayor Greg Scharff at a recent
city council meeting that ran late into the night. Six of the nine
council members agreed with Scharff. Only Adrian Fine thought Palo Alto
was being too hesitant. While the others want to see what happens in
cities that will allow retail sales, like Mountain View and San Jose,
before allowing anything more than deliveries, Fine would like to be
true to the wishes of 66 percent of Palo Altans who voted for
Proposition 64.
“I think our city is being too tepid,” said Fine. “Some of these businesses have helped places come back to life.”
Fine
received conditional support from Councilmember Cory Wolbach but was
otherwise alone in his wish to allow marijuana sales and dispensaries in
Palo Alto. Palo Alto City Attorney Molly Stump recommended that the
city only allow deliveries until state legislation is better understood.
She said more activities can be added then.
In Redwood City,
officials also favored more limited legalization. They worry that
allowing commercial cultivation, storage and retail sales could have
negative impacts on health and safety.
Some of the fears of the council
are that more marijuana activity will lead to increased youth use and
that the energy and temperature requirements for growing cannabis could
be a fire hazard within buildings.
Cities’ hesitance to legalize
all marijuana related operations illustrates the confusion and
complexity of legalizing an entire industry that is regulated at the
state, county and city levels. City council members are confused about
how the state plans to regulate the marijuana market, so cities are
making decisions based on what they know and what they can find out
between now and January.
Such an approach leads to a lot of variation
across California.
Many proponents of legalization say legalizing
the marijuana industry is a way to address all the problems associated
with lack of oversight, such as irresponsible farming and environmental
degradation, labor abuses, crime and no quality control.
Tamar
Todd, director of the office of legal affairs at Drug Policy Alliance, a
legalization advocacy group, said if officials were well informed, they
would know there isn’t increased crime or increased youth use in places
that have legalized recreational marijuana and that “there is
demonstrable harm with the policy we have had until now.”
“People
think prohibition is control when the opposite is true. It puts control
of the entire thing in the underground market,” said Amanda Reiman, the
community relations officer at Flow Kana, a cannabis brand based in
Mendocino and Humboldt counties. She explained that prohibition creates
many dangers for workers in the industry because they don’t have access
to the help that is available in legitimate employment channels.
States
that have already legalized recreational use of marijuana, like
Colorado in 2014, report that it is too soon to say what the effects of
legalization are on public safety, public health, or youth outcomes.
According to the data
collected by the Colorado Department of Public Safety, between 2012 and
legalization in 2014, marijuana-related arrests dropped by almost 50
percent. From 2014 to 2015, the Colorado State Patrol found that the
proportion of marijuana related DUI incidents had increased from 12
percent in 2014 to 15 percent in 2015. Data analyzed by the Colorado
Department of Public Health and Environment also showed that marijuana
related hospitalizations had increased after legalization from 803 per
100,000 in the period between 2001 and 2009 to 2,413 per 100,000 from
2014 to 2015. The Healthy Kids Colorado Survey shows that legalization had little impact on youth use.
Officials also worry about what the marijuana market will look like in California when marijuana remains an illegal schedule 1 drug
at the federal level. Companies entering the legal market in California
could still be subject to federal prosecution. Furthermore, prohibition
at the federal level means that the illegal market for cannabis outside
California remains and black market operators in California could
decide to stay outside the law to supply it.
Despite all the
uncertainty, Half Moon Bay is considering legalizing cultivation and
processing because farmers are struggling and cannabis offers a way to
bring farms back to life, Matthew Chidester, the deputy city manager,
said.
“The dried flower industry has declined in the last decade
due to foreign competition leaving excess growing capacity,” said
Chidester. “That excess capacity could be filled by cannabis
cultivation, and other commercial activities could create additional
income for these local farmers.”
Casey O’Neill, a farmer in
Mendocino county, said that the cannabis industry can help small farmers
because cannabis revenues mean that small farms can diversify from a
market in which they cannot compete with industrial farms. The
transition to cannabis will still be hard, said O’Neill, because the
California government has made it incredibly complicated to enter the
new market. Everything is still unclear.
“Constraints can show
this is a better way to go about farming,” said Reiman, who believes
that small batch cannabis farms can show that small farms are the future
of farming because they can produce superior quality products in a way
that is less damaging to the environment.
Ken Armstrong owns one
of the greenhouses on Highway 92, which he started after watching a
Youtube video on Aquaponics – a method for growing plants without soil
that produces no waste.
Armstrong is one of the pioneers of aquaponics
farming and he plans to be a pioneer in the legal cannabis industry.
He wants to grow cannabis using aquaponics because he can
produce a very high quality product and make five to six times more than
the $250,000 per year he is making growing lettuce. With a higher
revenue stream, he can fund more aquaponics systems to grow high quality
food with a low environmental footprint.
For people like
Armstrong, who are thinking of entering the legal marijuana industry and
have put significant energy into planning their transition to growing
cannabis, city councils’ hesitancy is frustrating.
“There’s things
that need to be done but if Half Moon Bay does not get its act together
I will go elsewhere,” said Armstrong. He believes municipalities are
missing out on an opportunity for a tax base with restrictions that will
not stop marijuana from getting into their communities. “People are
going to get their cannabis one way or another.”
No comments:
Post a Comment