Sharon Byrne: It’s Time to Ban Marijuana Dispensaries
http://www.noozhawk.com/noozhawk/article/021710_sharon_byrne/
By Sharon Byrne
A rising crime rate accompanying the proliferation of such facilities puts all of us at risk
On Tuesday, the Santa Barbara City Council will consider adopting what is now termed Phase I changes to the city’s Medical Cannabis Dispensary Ordinance. Adopting the ordinance would establish a cap of seven dispensaries and reopen the permit process. The same day, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors will consider extending the county’s moratorium on dispensaries while the board gathers information on regulating dispensaries.
Dispensaries are an entrepreneurial invention arising out of a hole in California law on how medical marijuana is distributed. The Compassionate Use Act permits qualified patients to possess and use marijuana under a doctor’s care. No solid mechanisms for distribution to patients are provided by the state, thus dispensaries have sprung up. Cities and counties have tried to deal with this, one at a time, as dispensaries opened in their jurisdictions. Many have opted to ban dispensaries, given the absence of state regulation and fears of increasing crime.
As a community, we need to wise up and join these municipalities because our own experiment with permitting dispensaries has been an abject failure. It has only led to a proliferation of unregulated dispensaries accompanied by serious trafficking crimes in our area. No one would have willingly signed up for this outcome.
How many dispensaries do we have? The city of Santa Barbara has permitted three. The county hasn’t issued any permits.
But since dispensaries mostly don’t bother getting permits, the number of permits doesn’t reflect how many there actually are. To find out, I went on weedmaps.com, where you can “Find Your Bud,” and made a few telephone calls to area dispensaries. There are currently, at a minimum, 17 dispensaries in the Santa Barbara area.
Santa Barbara
Permitted:
Green Light (opening soon)
The GreenWell
Pacific Coast Collective
Without permit:
AMG / Healing Gardens
Compassion Collective of Santa Barbara
420sb.com (online)
The Healing Center
Hortipharm Caregiver
Sacred Mountain Medicine
Santa Barbara Patients Group
Wonderful Life Grassroots Apothecary (online, mobile)
Goleta
Choice Cooperative Goleta
Grass Roots Research
Helping Hands Wellness Center
Santa Barbara Care Center
Summerland
The Green Room
Miramar Collective
Two illegal dispensaries have been closed by police recently and thus do not appear on this list.
There are several applicants waiting out the moratorium to open new dispensaries, which would boost the total north of 20 dispensaries. In comparison, there are 11 Starbucks in the same geographic area.
Can there really be more sick patients using an alternative, unregulated pain reliever than there are coffee drinkers? Santa Barbara just ranked No. 6 on a nationwide survey of cities for well-being, which seems utterly incongruent with an illness rate that requires 17 medical marijuana dispensaries.
One city-permitted dispensary, touting the nonprofit label, solicited investment from local businesses nearby, promising to double their money within a year. What true non-profit can promise this rate of return? Dispensary operators from other cities are opening here, and one local hopeful last owned a downtown bar. The Green Well dispensary hands out fliers in area nightclubs. Dispensaries run ads in the Santa Barbara Independent offering specials and promotions to bring in friends. Dispensaries may indeed help out a few patients, but their main business is sales for recreational use, and it’s time we were honest about that fact, because that is illegal.
Dispensary operators, facing vocal neighborhood opposition, contend that they reduce crime, and decrease the black market. City council members, seeking to verify this claim, have asked police representatives if there has been an increase in crime as measured in calls for service to dispensaries.
Unfortunately, the question is too narrow. Given that Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties have bans on dispensaries, the real question is this:
As the only city and county on the Central Coast that allows dispensaries, have we attracted criminal elements associated with marijuana, such as traffickers and cartel operators, to our area?
Intuitively, any locality allowing a business to sell marijuana out of a storefront, even under the banner of medical marijuana, would automatically attract all the criminal elements associated with it. Think of what would happen if there were such a thing as medical heroin, and we were the only city to allow it. Every illegal heroin trafficker would gravitate here. That’s exactly what’s happened with marijuana. We have created a pot depot, and the traffickers have come.
With their arrival comes marijuana-related crimes, and the scale is astonishing. Forget the police going after people smoking on the street, or growing a few plants. Brute prioritization has dictated that law enforcement ignore small-scale recreational users as they are consumed with major drug dealing, trafficking and firearms related to marijuana. Take a look at what’s happened just in the last year in the Santa Barbara area:
» In April, campers stumbled upon a marijuana site that contained 13,000 plants worth $26.6 million in Aliso Park near New Cuyama. Two men guarding the plants threatened the hikers and ordered them to wait for a “boss.” The hikers fled, but on the drive out of the backcountry were chased by two men in a truck.
» An armed extortion occurred at a marijuana dispensary where two owners allegedly held the third at knifepoint.
» In July, the Sheriff’s Department discovered a $75 million illegal cultivation site of 25,000 plants north of East Camino Cielo.
» In August, the 88,000-acre La Brea Fire was started by a campfire at an illegal marijuana operation in Los Padres National Forest. More than 30,000 plants were found near the blaze’s origin and a Mexican drug cartel is believed to be involved.
» A marijuana dealer operating from a trailer on Cacique Street was shut down. He claimed to be a dispensary.
» A multiagency law-enforcement team executed Operation Apehanger, an enormous raid on an alleged illegal firearms and drug-trafficking operation that resulted in 11 arrests. One residence in which firearms were found was directly across from Monroe School. There were children in the home.
» Seizure of $800,000 in marijuana plants and cash in Goleta. The pot was being grown in sophisticated indoor gardens.
» In November, an enormous drug-trafficking bust was coordinated across five counties. The growing operation was located off West Camino Cielo. An alleged homicide is believed to be related to the operation, although a body has yet to be found. Authorities arrested 17 people, including two juveniles. The 5,000-plus plants seized were valued at $15 million.
» In January, four suspects in a marijuana-trafficking ring were arrested. The total value of the marijuana and plants seized has a street value of $490,000.
» Six suspects were arrested in a raid of an illegal dispensary on Bond Street, and 63 pounds of marijuana was later found buried in a yard in Santa Ynez. Two of the dispensary employees were also investigated for an assault with a deadly weapon against a former employee. This is the second time in two years this dispensary, operating out of a home within a half-block of Santa Barbara Junior High, has been shut down.
» Two people were arrested on drug charges after a fire destroyed a De la Vina Street apartment. Investigators said the blaze was the result of an illegal marijuana operation, and that the residents were using highly flammable butane to convert marijuana from leaf form to concentrated oil to sell to a dispensary. A family with children live in the adjoining apartment.
» Earlier this month, 100 pounds of marijuana were confiscated during a routine traffic stop in Santa Barbara. The suspect owned the ACME Collective dispensary, a Victoria Street operation that was shut down by police last year.
The illegal grows found last year in our area topped $206 million. That is major trafficking, on an enormous scale. California law enforcement has asserted that illegal growing operations in the backcountry are a result of Mexican cartels moving supply closer to the dispensaries. It is apparently far easier to locate cartel workers here in our mountains to grow pot than it is to ship bulk across tightening borders. There are serious dangers to hikers who wish to enjoy the splendid mountain trails close by. The cost to the environment is exorbitant, and no funding exists to clean up the environmental damage caused by illegal mountain grows.
All of this crime happened while there was an ordinance permitting dispensaries. Despite the best intentions of the city of Santa Barbara to regulate dispensaries, crime related to illegal trafficking has exploded. Surely there is a better answer than to try the same experiment again, hoping for a different result. Traffickers never submitted to regulation before, and they won’t now. Most dispensaries don’t even bother with the permitting process, and thus don’t submit to regulation.
Dispensary operators’ claims that they decrease crime, and further, that they welcome regulation, is a nice sound bite and may well be sincere. But the truth is it’s a farce that regulating dispensaries makes illegal traffickers and crime go away. The exact opposite has happened, and it’s clearly impossible to uncouple one from the other. It doesn’t matter how responsible dispensaries portend to be. Unfortunately, the reality is that allowing dispensaries throughout our metro area attracts the illegal drug trade right along with it, and this puts citizens in danger.
While dispensaries are not specifically permitted by state law, collectives are. The state’s definition of a collective is so loose you could drive a truck through it. It’s merely an organization in which patients and caregivers come together in a closed loop to grow and share the marijuana. No sales are allowed, although some reimbursement of expense incurred is permitted. Dispensaries have caught on, often incorporating “collective” into their business name.
Some council members believe allowing dispensaries that sell marijuana will somehow prevent collectives and mobile dispensaries from starting up. Again, the opposite has already happened: mobile and online delivery dispensaries are springing up without bothering to get permits. It’s really a strange bit of logic: permit an organization not specifically allowed by state law in order to prevent one that is specifically allowed by state law. Should the city or county attempt to regulate collectives, they’ll have their work cut out for them, since they’d need to address grow house / field regulations, individual member contributions to the collective, and other hazy areas left unregulated by state law. No city or county in California has successfully attempted this.
Local governments are therefore completely hamstrung within a vacuum of obtuse state laws as they attempt to regulate a business that engages primarily in recreational sales of an illegal drug. Our experience demonstrates that if local officials allow this business, it automatically attracts large-scale criminal elements to the locality, and thus endangers their own citizens. It’s a terrible conundrum: allow dispensaries, thus creating a pot depot in the area, and attract dangerous criminal elements, or ban dispensaries to protect residents while the state churns forward to some less convoluted conclusion on how medical marijuana will be distributed.
Until the state untangles the laws on the subject, the needs of the many for public safety must outweigh the needs of the few for an alternative, unregulated and still controversial pain relief. The collateral damage that accompanies dispensaries is just too great.
A ban is the only sensible option now.
— Sharon Byrne is a neighborhood activist for West Downtown, a freelance writer, and a Santa Barbara Junior High parent. She also serves on the Franklin Community Center Advisory Committee.
http://www.noozhawk.com/noozhawk/article/021710_sharon_byrne/