DON'T INHALE. YET.

It's not easy, being an elected official.

May look like it is from the outside, as community members generally
get worked up only about a single issue, one which looks to them both
urgent and simple.

But few issues are simple any longer, as one action may have
ramifications reaching into wholly different issues. And even on a
particular issue, there are the competing interests of government
regulation vs. personal freedom, that is, when and how curtailing the
free actions of individuals is in the public interest. More often
than not, that's a difficult judgment call, and our representatives
are quick to grasp, even if they had been aware of it intellectually,
that, "You can't please all the people all the time."

Few issues demonstrate the truth of this observation more than the
medical marijuana dispensary question soon to come before the Sonoma
City Council. Readers know that we have long favored the legalization
of marijuana, though we rush to point out that we do not endorse its
use. We merely note that, as a society, we bear significant costs
from the prohibition against marijuana - costs similar, as we and
many others have pointed out, to those associated with the
prohibition against alcohol in the 1930s. Those costs include
criminalization of a recreational activity enjoyed by numbers of
otherwise law-abiding citizens, involvement of an increasingly
organized criminal element to supply demand on the black market, and
a corrupting influence on law enforcement due to the high profits.

But the issue before the council is not legalization - that's not in
their purview. The establishment of marijuana dispensaries, while
certainly making pot more readily available, falls well short of
legalization. Indeed, many of the elements from the Prohibition era
appear, as the supply, potency and distribution of pot are still
largely unregulated.

What will come before the council is an ordinance limiting the
activities of businesses wanting to locate within the city limits of
Sonoma. Readers know that, as proponents of private enterprise and
limited government, our inclination is always to keep regulations to
a minimum. The regulations proposed in this ordinance seem
burdensome: limiting the businesses' inventory to whatever its
clients can grow, outside city limits; limiting the number of people
who can be associated with the business; limiting the number of sales
it can make. The city doesn't regulate the number of members in a
wine club, for instance, or how many sales a winery can make in its
tasting room.

Of course, the council can decide to prohibit the business
altogether, as it did with the private imaging lab that sought a
location in Sonoma several years ago. There were other problems with
that application, but a key factor in the denial was precluding the
competition with Sonoma Valley Hospital. The city council considered
the larger effect a business will have on the community and should
consider denial in this case, too.

Pot is a multimillion-dollar industry that need not be run by
criminals. Far better that the product be sold under license and with
age restrictions at, say, a 7-11, rather than in the shadows by a
dealer. The dispensary operations, while tempting as a first step in
that direction, are not transparent enough, nor their regulation
clear enough. With present efforts at the state and even federal
level for true legalization, the city council should wait, in our
view, for that better option.