TC SHOULD HAVE PATCHED MEDICAL MARIJUANA LAW EARLIER

It's encouraging that Traverse City planners apparently are willing to
plug holes in and make changes to the city's rather sketchy medical
marijuana ordinance.

But city residents should be concerned that an ordinance approved just
a few months ago already needs major tweaking -- the kind of tweaking
that should have been done before the new law ever made it to the city
commission.

Further, the city should consider itself lucky it has time to make
needed changes -- including deciding where so-called "collectives" can
be established -- before it was too late.

The city is considering a change that would require medical marijuana
collectives, where certified patients can go to purchase marijuana
from certified growers, to be located at least 500 feet apart.

The ordinance, which was adopted in August, permits collectives in
most commercial districts of the city. Marijuana can change hands at
such locations, but can't be grown there.

City Planner Russ Soyring said the spacing rule is intended to make
sure the city doesn't end up with a cluster of collectives.

There are at least three now -- one on Garfield Avenue near Centre
Street, another on State Street downtown and one based at the Crema
coffee shop on Front Street -- and officials expect at least three
more in the coming months.

If the city had waited until any of the ones yet to come had already
leased space, it may have been hard to enforce the 500-foot rule.

Such spacing requirements are hardly new to the people who write
ordinances, particularly zoning laws. And they should have been part
of the medical-marijuana ordinance before the fact.

The city will also require that potential collective operators provide
the owner's name at least 10 business days before the operation is set
to open. That's Permits 101 stuff; people who run everything from day
cares to bars have to let the city know who is whom; marijuana
collectives can't be any different.

The city stumbled on that one when they realized that a man who filed
to open Collective Inc., the State Street operation, recently had been
convicted in a felony drug case, a clear violation of the law. That
man, Damon Granger, sold the collective to three downstate residents
- -- including his fiancee -- about the same time it opened.

The ordinance has also come under fire because it allows certified
caregivers, those who can grow and sell marijuana to certified
patients, to grow as many as 72 plants in a home zoned for
single-family -- not commercial -- use.

We've said it before -- passage of the medical-marijuana ballot
initiative was an act of compassion for those suffering diseases they
didn't ask for. That doesn't mean, however, that the state and local
governments don't have the right and the obligation to regulate the
cultivation and distribution of what still is, after all, an illegal
drug for the rest of us.