The Zoning Board of Appeals yesterday put off a vote on a permit to the first company awarded a provisional state license to sell medical marijuana in Boston until the company confers with the most vocal opponents of its downtown location.
After hearing testimony from both sides in a packed meeting yesterday, ZBA Chairwoman Christine Araujo told Patriot Care Corp., which wants to open a dispensary at 21 Milk St. near Downtown Crossing, to come back Aug. 4 after talks with the Downtown Boston Business Improvement District, whose chairman said the group opposes the location.
“Our members have invested a lot of dollars in this area at a time when it was in decline,” DBBID chairman John H. Spurr Jr. said. “We feel it’s on the upswing, and this is a step in the wrong direction.”
Boston police Superintendent Bernard O’Rourke said his department also opposes allowing a dispensary at the location, calling the consequences of such a decision a “great unknown.”
Beth Epstein, whose husband owns the Milk Street Cafe, told the Herald thousands of children stop by the Old South Meeting House, only yards away.
But Dennis Kunian, a Patriot Care spokesman, said each person who buys from the dispensary would have to submit a recommendation from a doctor to the state Department of Public Health.
The dispensary would not sell marijuana for recreational use, even if an anticipated 2016 ballot initiative for legalization wins approval, the company’s lawyer, former City Council president Michael P. Ross, told the Herald.
The Rev. Tom Conway of St. Anthony’s Shrine in Downtown Crossing said at the hearing his friend is in Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center for Ogilvie’s syndrome, a rare colon disorder, and is allergic to most pain medications. His doctor recommended medical marijuana, Conway said, and he received permission from the state.
“That’s his one hope away from the pain,” he said. “And he’s just going to suffer more with each month of delays.”