COUNCIL TAKING SENSIBLE APPROACH TO DISPENSARIES

Fort Collins Making Reasonable Decisions About Medical Marijuana

The Fort Collins City Council has taken a thoughtful, deliberative
approach to the difficult challenge of regulating medical marijuana
dispensaries. Though the council is scheduled to take final action
tonight on a pair of ordinances, work still remains to be done on the
state and city levels.

Colorado voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2000 legalizing
marijuana for medicinal purposes, but the issue lay dormant for almost
nine years because few businesses wanted to risk negotiating the
differences between state and federal laws. That changed last year
when the U.S. Justice Department announced, in effect, that it
wouldn't prosecute medical marijuana providers who operated in
compliance with state law.

That announcement sparked an explosion of medical marijuana
dispensaries across the state, including in Northern Colorado. Early
sales tax data suggests that medical marijuana as a business went from
being virtually nonexistent to $6 million in annualized sales in Fort
Collins, Loveland and Windsor virtually overnight.

That has left the state Legislature and local governments across the
state scrambling to regulate this new industry.

Fort Collins has opted for a sensible approach that would keep
dispensaries 1,000 feet from schools and either 500 or 1,000 feet from
other institutions such as churches, child-care facilities and
recreational areas. Dispensaries would be restricted to designated
commercial zones, and marijuana growing operations to industrial zones.

Still to be determined is whether to include a "grandfather" clause
for existing businesses that wouldn't be in compliance with the new
ordinance. The Fort Collins City Council likely will delay that
decision to see how many existing businesses would be affected.

The medical marijuana issue is emotional and is tied in some ways to a
decades-old drug control policy that has been largely unsuccessful. So
far, the Fort Collins City Council has taken a reasonable approach
that will let dispensaries operate - as voters clearly desired in 2000
- - while also minimizing the potential problems tied to dispensaries.