OAKLAND SUSPENDS LEGAL MARIJUANA FARM ORDINANCE

The Oakland City Council abruptly halted plans to allow some of the
world's largest legal marijuana farms to open in the city after
prosecutors warned city officials that they could be vulnerable to prosecution.

The council on Tuesday suspended the city's cultivation ordinance,
which council members adopted in July to raise new city revenue and
rein in the sometimes dangerous black-market farms that are now the norm.

The decision came two weeks after Alameda County District Attorney
Nancy O'Malley warned that the ordinance was problematic because it
conflicted with state law.

"It remains an open question," O'Malley wrote, whether city officials
and staff "who aid and abet or conspire to violate state or federal
laws in furtherance of a city ordinance are exempt from criminal liability."

The ordinance's suspension does not kill plans for licensed marijuana
farms. The council asked city staff to return Feb. 1 with amendments
that would make the ordinance comply with state law.

A key problem is that the ordinance appears to have been contingent
on the passage of Proposition 19, a state ballot measure rejected by
voters in November that would have legalized adult recreational use
of marijuana.

City officials previously said the ordinance would have been
applicable regardless of the passage of Prop. 19, but that now
appears not to be true.

"The cultivation ordinance the city was doing had been based on Prop.
19 passing," said Council President Jane Brunner. "Now there has to
be a regrouping."

Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan, who drafted the ordinance and had been
its key backer, was not available for interviews Wednesday, said
Jason Overman, her spokesman.

The ordinance did not limit the size of farms, and one potential
applicant approached the city with a proposal for a
100,000-square-foot facility - roughly the size of two football fields.

It is likely that the ordinance will be revised to limit the size of
farms, said Brunner and cannabis activist Richard Lee, president of
Oaksterdam University.

Oakland's ordinance would have permitted four large farms whose total
crop would have supplied a substantial portion of the Bay Area
medicinal marijuana needs.

The farms each would have had to pay a $211,000 permit fee and would
have been required to meet expensive rules, such as obtaining $3
million worth of insurance. However, the idea of for-profit cannabis
cultivation conflicts with state law, according to county prosecutor
O'Malley and Oakland City Attorney John Russo.

Russo said the city's best protection was to abide by the guidelines
established by Proposition 215, which state voters passed in 1996.

"There's no authority in 215 to grow pot for profit," Russo said Wednesday.

Stephen DeAngelo, the owner of the Harborside Health Center
dispensary, had said in July that Oakland's proposed ordinance was
probably illegal because it severed the relationship between patients
and their medicine. Brunner and Russo said Wednesday that analysis was correct.

"What the state law creates is a rubric in which only patients and
their caregivers can legally grow pot," said Russo, an outspoken
advocate for medicinal marijuana and Prop. 19.

If Prop. 19 had passed, marijuana growing would continue to expand in
the black market unless cities, like Oakland, provided cultivation
permits. In Oakland and in many other cities, black-market growing
results in shoddy electrical work and burglaries and robberies.
Moving marijuana out of neighborhoods and into regulated venues has
been portrayed by advocates as a public safety issue.