Medical Marijuana: Battle Over Regulating Los Angeles Dispensaries Drags On, But Council Rejects Prosecutor's Advice

For four years, the Los Angeles City Council has been wrestling with how to regulate the city's rapidly growing number of medical marijuana dispensaries. When the council started, there were four dispensaries in the city. When it initiated a moratorium on new dispensaries in 2007, there were 186. Now, there are close to a thousand.

This week the council came closer to adopting regulations, but it isn't there yet, and a vote is now set for next week. But this week, medical marijuana advocates fended off what would have been a fatal blow when two council committees rejected language that would have barred the sale of medical marijuana.

That language came from the office of City Attorney Carmen Trutanich, who, along with LA County District Attorney Steve Cooley, maintains that California's medical marijuana only allows collectives to grow marijuana -- not to sell it. That is not a widely shared interpretation of the law, and it was not a popular one, either with the city council or with the hundreds of medical marijuana supporters who jammed the council chambers during hearings this week.

Councilman Ed Reyes expressed frustration with the city attorney's office, saying, "I think they are very, very narrow in that they're taking their prosecutorial perspective."

Councilman Dennis Zine urged his colleagues to interpret state law in way that would not disrupt the way dispensaries currently operate. "Why don't we push the envelope to the edge and see what we can do?" he said.

After the council rejected the prosecutors' advice, DA Cooley reacted angrily and threatened to prosecute dispensaries regardless of what the council decides. "Undermining those laws via their ordinance powers is counterproductive, and, quite frankly, we're ignoring them. They are absolutely so irrelevant it's not funny," Cooley said, adding that state law and court decisions made it clear that collectives cannot sell marijuana. Most, if not all, dispensaries in the county were operating illegally, he said. "We don't know of one that's not engaging in just over-the-counter sales," he said.

Medical marijuana advocates beg to differ. The Union of Medical Marijuana Patients delivered a 23-page legal analysis of the issue to the city council that unsurprisingly came to a quite different conclusion from the prosecutors. "We're really disappointed because we have been thinking that the district attorney would have respect for what the City Council would come up with," said James Shaw, the group's director. "We're taking his threats as real."

Properly organized collectives can indeed sell marijuana, said Joe Elford, chief counsel for Americans for Safe Access, the nation's largest medical marijuana advocacy group. "The idea that a nonprofit collective can't sell things is just a bizarre interpretation of the law," he said.

The council was supposed to vote on the ordinance Wednesday, but postponed the vote until next week, saying they needed to study late amendments to it. One such amendment, from Councilman Jose Huizar, would cap the number of dispensaries at 70. Another, from Councilman Reyes would create a system to audit dispensaries. Reyes also proposed reducing the required distance between dispensaries and schools, parks, and other places where children gather from 1,000 feet to 500 feet. Councilman Paul Koretz introduced a series of amendments based on the ordinance in West Hollywood, in effect for four years.

Perhaps the city council will get it all sorted out and actually pass an ordinance next week. But if the rejectionist attitudes of city and county prosecutors are any indication, the battle over medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles is nowhere near over.