CITY MAPS SHOW HOW SCHOOL BUFFER ZONES WOULD AFFECT MEDICAL MARIJUANA
DISPENSARIES

Much like the rest of the state, Ann Arbor is in a legal limbo where
medical marijuana is concerned.

Michigan voters approved the legalization of medical marijuana in
November 2008, yet marijuana remains illegal at the federal level. And
nothing in the law voters passed says anything about marijuana
dispensaries or guides municipalities on how to regulate them.

So the City of Ann Arbor has decided to take matters into its own
hands and pass a medical marijuana ordinance. But that effort has been
slow-moving and controversial. City Council, which still needs to pass
next year's budget, won't even take another look at the ordinance
until at least the June 6 meeting. By that point, as Dave Askins of
the Ann Arbor Chronicle explained after the May 2 meeting, the city
will have been working on the marijuana ordinance for a year. Mayor
John Hieftje bemoaned the sheer amount of time the city has put into
crafting an ordinance that still has yet to pass.

One of the least controversial measures of the ordinance would create
buffer zones between public schools and medical marijuana
dispensaries.

And due to a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by
Edward Vielmetti, former lead blogger for AnnArbor.com and a FOIA
enthusiast, we now know what those buffer zones would look like.

The 6 maps in the set range from 200-foot buffers up to 1,100 feet. At
the May 2 meeting Councilman Carsten Hohnke, a Ward 5 Democrat,
proposed a 1,010 foot buffer, and that map is included in the set as
well. Vielmetti posted a link to the maps on www.a2docs.org, a
repository for local government documents.

See the maps for yourself at: http://a2docs.org/doc/293/ .