The Pittsburg Planning Commission will consider a staff recommendation to ban medical marijuana dispensaries.
If
commissioners on Tuesday approve the staff recommendation, the matter
will go to the City Council as an ordinance for a vote.
In April
of 2011, council members adopted a moratorium, which expires in April,
that prohibited dispensaries from operating while staff studied whether
to develop regulations to allow them to operate. The recommendation
calls for making it official city policy to ban them outright.
Before
the moratorium went into effect, East Bay Collective operated a
dispensary without a permit, but it didn’t stay open because the city
got a court injunction to shut it down.
There are no requests
before the city to operate a dispensary, and when the city considered
the initial moratorium and two later extensions, no one showed up to
protest the action.
If approved, the ban on dispensaries would not
prevent a qualified patient from growing medical marijuana in his or
her own home for personal use, City Attorney Ruthann Ziegler said in an
email.
A staff report said the ban was needed in the interest of
public safety and that the use of medical marijuana is prohibited under
federal law, even though its medical use was approved by California
voters in 1996. The report cited a white paper by the California Police
Chiefs Association that said many violent crimes, including armed
robbery and murder, have been associated with dispensaries.
Antioch has a moratorium on dispensaries, while Oakley and Brentwood have banned them.
"Unfortunately,
(a ban) is not all that unusual," said Kris Hermes, spokesman for
Americans for Safe Access, a national organization advocating for safe
and legal use of medical marijuana. "While there are dozens of
municipalities that have recognized their patients’ needs for medical
marijuana and regulate their activities, there are more than three times
the number that have banned it outright."
Statewide, more than 50
cities and counties allow dispensaries, more than 70 cities have
moratoriums against them, and 170 cities have banned them, according to
Americans for Safe Access.
"California is still a patchwork of
bans and regulatory ordinances," Hermes said. "That is still very
problematic for a large number of patients who don’t live anywhere near
an operating dispensary."
