SAN BERNARDINO >> A study into possibly allowing some medical marijuana dispensaries is out, and a new program of more aggressive enforcement is in.
That’s the decision the City Council came to in a closed-session discussion Monday, City Attorney Gary Saenz said.
“At this time, the full Common Council has, by consensus, determined that the city will continue its total land-use ban against dispensaries; will not, at this time, ordain to allow regulated dispensaries, and will incorporate additional and more aggressive methods of enforcement in our quest to rid, or significantly reduce, the number of illegal dispensaries operating in our city,” Saenz said.
That comes two months after Saenz called for a plan that “essentially acknowledges the futility and high cost” of the city’s ban, which hasn’t stopped an estimated 20 to 30 dispensaries from illegally operating at any given time.
Council members, too, said after several committee meetings studying the issue they’d been swayed toward allowing some highly regulated dispensaries. They asked the full council to decide the issue, but before it showed up on the agenda for public discussion they reached Monday’s private consensus.
The exact reasoning behind the decision is opaque and subject to rules about what closed-session discussions can be made public, but council members suggest they’ve gotten significant help from outside of the city.
“We are confident now that we have the ability to enforce the prohibition as it actually exists,” Councilman Henry Nickel said Wednesday. “I don’t want to go into detail about what additional resources are available, but there has been a change in circumstance.”
Councilman Benito Barrios, who like Nickel sits on the Legislative Review Committee that studied the marijuana policy in detail, said he had originally favored a full ban.
“But then, learning how other cities were regulating them so people who really do get it for medical reasons (can safely access medical marijuana), I was more open to, ‘Maybe this is the way,’ ” Barrios said. “Not necessarily to get any monetary gain, but get it so we don’t have the problems.”
Barrios was referring to studies the city attorney’s staff made along with council members of other cities’ approaches to medical marijuana.
“But things have changed to where the city have taken a stand to shutting them all down,” Barrios said. “I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of that change. When the time comes to regulate, then I will be in favor.”
The quiet nature of the decision, and the decision itself, don’t sit well with advocates for increased medical marijuana access who had followed the city’s deliberations hopefully.
“I find it either maybe a bit cowardly that they quickly did that, or maybe they played the public that they would do something,” said San Bernardino resident William Cioci, president of the Brownie Mary Democratic Club of San Bernardino County and an open user of medical marijuana.
Cioci had attended the committee meetings discussing marijuana and had been checking council agendas so he could speak when the issue came up.
“I would have let them know that they let down the medical cannabis patients of this community,” Cioci said he would have told the council, “and that they’re continuing to promote this violence that’s going on in allowing the dispensaries that we have. This in no way keeps the medical cannabis out. It just blocks safe access.”
Nickel said he had watched a number of raids and other visits to the city’s dispensaries as he studied the issue, and he hadn’t seen the sympathetic patients he’d heard described.
“I was hoping to at least provide some justification for some of the rather passionate arguments that were presented,” he said. “Based on my research and going out in the field, that’s not what I saw.”
