Herb Ninja

Fallout follows medical marijuana ruling in California

6-07-2005 | LISA LEFF | AP

Alameda County supervisors moved ahead with regulations on Tuesday for creating more medical marijuana dispensaries, but backed away from locating one in a county hospital because they worried it might endanger federal health care funds following a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling on medicinal cannabis use.

On the day after the Supreme Court affirmed the federal government's right to prosecute pot-smoking patients in state's with medical marijuana laws, other California communities responded to the justice's 6-3 ruling in other ways. They included instructing local law enforcement to stop returning marijuana seized from people citing a doctor's recommendation to enacting temporary bans on news clubs.

In Northern California's Mill Valley, for example, officials unanimously approved a 45-day moratorium on cannabis clubs Monday night while rejecting an application from a group that wanted to open the city's first. California's Department of Health Services said it would have to review the high court's ruling before moving forward with a plan to create a statewide database of county-issued cannabis users cards.

San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who has been developing rules for monitoring the dispensaries that some see as too laid-back even by liberal city standards, said the court's decision means that local officials will have to dance "a very fine pirouette between federal, state and local legal and policy land mines and the confidentiality of patients themselves."

"Communities that overwhelmingly support medical marijuana are now becoming host to clubs that operate in a regulation-free environment, and that creates an uneasy tension between everybody involved," Mirkarimi said.

Even before the Supreme Court issued its ruling Monday, cities throughout California and nine other states that sanction medicinal pot use were wrestling with how to regulate the cannabis clinics, co-ops and clubs popping up in their communities.

Last year, the city of Oakland cracked down on the dispensaries taking root in a section of downtown that had acquired the nickname "Oaksterdam," limiting the number of clubs to four and forcing at least eight others to close. More than a dozen communities have crafted similar laws, while many others have instituted temporary bans while they come up with their own.'

From San Francisco, home to at least 43 of the state's 125 dispensaries, to Ontario in Southern California, which has none, local officials have been unsure how to control businesses that straddle a gray zone between legitimate and illegal.

Alameda County supervisors contemplated that question Tuesday as they approved a plan for permitting three new medical marijuana facilities to open, one each in the areas of San Leandro, Castro Valley and Ashland-Cherryland. Unincorporated Alameda already has seven dispensaries. The rules covered such matters as background checks for dispensary operators and how close the facilities can do business to schools and to each other.

"The federal government is not interested in coming in here if everything is peaceful and quiet and people are getting what they need," said Sheriff Charles Plummer, who endorsed the plan. "But they won't hesitate to come in here if people are walking away with two or three pounds (of pot.) And I will help them, if that is the case."

With Plummer's endorsement, Alameda officials originally considered distributing medical marijuana through a public hospital. But at Tuesday's meeting, supervisors put that option on hold while they appoint an advisory panel to study it and other possible regulations. Because of the Supreme Court's ruling, however, Board President Keith Carson said he was wary of having the advisory committee spend time on the hospital idea.

"The federal government gives us a lot of money and I don't want to jeopardize that money," Carson said.

Officials in the cities of San Francisco, Tulare, Visalia, Ontario and now Mill Valley have all enacted temporary bans while they scramble to write zoning, permitting and in some cases health code rules dictating how the facilities operate.

State health officials said the department still plans to start the voluntary ID card registry as a pilot project in Del Norte, Amador, Mendocino and Trinity counties this summer to comply with a law passed last year requiring a database that law enforcement agencies could check to verify people's claims they have a medical reason for possession pot.

"We have to take this ruling and try to figure out what it means to (the) program," said Robert Miller, a state health department spokesman.

Kern County District Attorney Edward Jagels said his office would advise police agencies to stop returning the marijuana they have seized from people with a doctor's letter of when the possessor shows a prescription, something many law enforcement agencies in the state have done in the past.

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