Much like every other bad thing that's ever been said about marijuana, complaints about the role of medical dispensaries in creating crime have turned out to be wild exaggerations. If you don't believe me, try asking someone a little more qualified to opine on the matter, like, for example, the frickin' Police Chief of Los Angeles:

Despite neighborhood complaints, most medical marijuana clinics are not typically the magnets for crime that critics often portray, according to Los Angeles police Chief Charlie Beck.

"Banks are more likely to get robbed than medical marijuana dispensaries," Beck said at a recent meeting with editors and reporters of the Los Angeles Daily News.

Opponents of the pot clinics complain that they attract a host of criminal activity to the neighborhoods, including robberies. But a report that Beck recently had the department generate looking at citywide robberies in 2009 found that simply wasn't the case. [LA Daily News]

Well, how do you like that? Banks are robbed constantly by angry gun-wielding assholes, but you've never heard anyone lobbying to keep them 1,000 feet away from schools and parks. Meanwhile, the biggest security threat at the dispensaries has typically been the DEA (and yes, they were routinely grabbing money from dispensaries at gunpoint until the DOJ told them to find something better to do)

The very notion of dispensaries attracting crime is largely illogical on its face, given that the whole purpose of their existence is to remove sick people from the black-market marijuana economy. Legal medical marijuana providers reduce crime on a massive scale simply by opening their doors each day. Even The Washington Post has observed the role of dispensaries in undermining cartel profits, and one couldn’t possibly calculate the cumulative crime-control benefits of millions of marijuana transactions that would otherwise have occurred in the shadows.

Cheap and unfounded claims about dispensaries attracting crime have served only to discredit their authors, while infusing needless controversy and confusion into the regulatory process. As advocates for medical marijuana, we have no opposition to sensible regulations, but policy debates should be aimed at serving the interests of patients and the community, not indulging fictitious fears at the expense of helping real people.