The letters were no surprise the more than 500 dispensaries targeted for closure by the city. They knew it was coming. The action stems from the decision months ago by the City Council to adopt new rules regulating how medical marijuana is dispensed in Los Angeles, which came after a two-year moratorium on new dispensaries. The new rules only allow, among other things, a certain amount of medical pot dispensaries in the city and limits where they would be located.
Before then, the city had virtually no rules on how to regulate medical marijuana, which state voters made legal in 1996 with Proposition 215. The clinics therefore opened up where they wanted, clustering in some neighborhoods in disproportionate numbers. About 186 medical pot collectives were in existence before the November 2007 moratorium. Those that remain open today - about 130 - are exempt from closure.
But in the interim, hundreds more dispensaries - no one is still sure how many - opened up shop. Those are the dispensaries the city is shutting down.
Some of the dispensary owners are fighting back, using their last few weeks to seek asylum from the city law. They are arguing that the city issued licenses and permits to them but now is discriminating against them for political reasons. Furthermore, they argue that the existing dispensaries aren't able to meet the marijuana demands of a city of 4 million people and that patients will be forced to buy their pot from illegal drug dealers.
The city argues that these businesses never should have opened in the first place, being that there was a moratorium at the time.
What do you think?
Should these existing business be grandfathered into the city's new laws? Are jobs - not to mention tax revenue - during a recession more important than the city's efforts to regulate pot sales?
Or is this absolutely the right step to put the city on the path to regulated and reasonable marijuana dispensaries that it should have started down years ago?
Or should the city just wait to see what happens with the November state ballot initiative that would legalize the personal use and growing of marijuana in California, which would make this fight moot?
Send your responses to opinionated@dailynews.com. Please include your full name, the community or city in which you live and a daytime phone number. We'll print as many as we can in Sunday's Opinionated section.
Source: Los Angeles Daily News
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