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With the full City Council set to take up Wednesday a proposal to crack down on the proliferation of marijuana dispensaires, Councilman Ed Reyes accused City Attorney Carmen Trutanich and District Attorney Steve Cooley of playing politics with the issue. “This is not about Cooley versus Reyes, or Cooley versus the council. This is about the quality of life. We all have better things to do than to do this legal jousting,” Reyes said Tuesday. “We’re here to serve the people, not to serve each other’s political agenda,” he said. “It makes no sense to play political football with people’s lives.” Reyes was responding to an LA Times report that Cooley threatened to prosecute dispensaries that "sell" medical marijuana even if the Los Angeles City Council adopts an ordinance that allows such sales. On Monday, two council committees rejected the Trutanich’s plan to change a provision in the proposed ordinance, allowing cash transactions as long as they complied with state law. “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. said the law was not clear on the issue. “We’ll let the courts decide,” he said. “We are trying our very best to work with a system that is very vague at this moment.”
He also noted that Cooley and Trutanich were allies and that both spoke at a training session for narcotics officers focused on eradicating dispensaries. “We’re here to serve the people, not to serve each other’s political agenda,” he said. “It makes no sense to play political football with people’s lives. “What the City Council is doing is beyond meaningless and irrelevant.” The fight is likely to end up in the courts. Trutanich has proposed a tough ordinance that would protect true collectives where members grow their own marijuana and share it with other patients but would ban outright sales and dispensaries where anyone could walk in with a prescription and buy marijuana. Here's links to the ordinance and modifications he has proposed and his latest correspondence with the Council. And here's the email sent out Tuesday by the Sunland-Tujunga Neighborhood Council: Dear Neighbors,
A regulatory ordinance regarding Medical Marijuana Collectives
(Dispensaries) in the City of Los Angeles will appear before City Council
tomorrow (Wednesday) at 10 a.m. If you have an interest in this
ordinance, your participation is encouraged. You can participate by
attending the City Council meeting tomorrow morning or by submitting
comments (see below) directly to the City Council.
Whether it be the adoption of the current version #5 of the ordinance or
some other version, we must urge the City Council to take action now. It
is important that the community let the city council members know that we
want an ordinance in place. It’s been more than two years since the
process of turning out a workable ordinance started. In that time we have
seen the original 186 dispensaries have grown to somewhere between 800 and
1100 locations. Sunland-Tujunga currently has 14 sites that we know of
with no regulations in place. Without an ordinance, there is nothing to
restrict who can open or operate one of these dispensaries. That includes
someone who has previously been convicted of trafficking in narcotics or
of any other felony. Right now it’s easier to open a marijuana dispensary
in Los Angeles than it is to open a liquor store or a bar. The STNC Land
Use Committee, at their last meeting, voted to recommend the City
Attorney's draft ordinance be passed by the City Council and include an
urgency clause.
NOTE: The City Attorney released a NEW draft of their proposed regulations
on 11/13. Click
http://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2008/08-0923_misc_11-13-09.pdf to view
the NEW draft (pages 2 and 3 of the draft summarize the changes). The main
points of the draft regulations remain unchanged.
"Councilwoman Janice Hahn" <
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"CD 2 seat open" [formerly Greuel]
You can contact Council President Garcetti as follows:
Eric Garcetti (213) 473-7013
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-Cindy Cleghorn, Secretary
Sunland-Tujunga Neighborhood Council
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