CITY RUSH TO CLOSE MARIJUANA CO-OPS: WILL IT EVEN WORK?

Even if the city of Redding orders its many medical-marijauana
"co-ops" to close their doors by the end of the month, and they
comply, does anyone think fewer users will be buying marijuana under
the protections of Proposition 215?

Whether you sympathize with patients suffering severe health problems
who find cannabis eases their pain or think that pot smokers are just
scamming the system to avoid criminal prosecution, it's hard to see
the business going away. Not so long as state law grants near-total
criminal immunity to users and growers who can maintain even a faade
of medicinal need.

But what a forced shutdown of storefronts would do is force the
business out of a few commercial strips back into residential
neighborhoods, city parks and the trunks of cars at mall parking lots.
It would create more street drug dealers and fewer business operators
with an incentive to control nuisances and keep up their reputation.

It would also poison a spirit of reasonable cooperation that the city
has developed over the past two years under its licensing ordinance.
Just-retired Police Chief Peter Hansen has said that most operators
have worked hard to comply with the law and be good neighbors - though
he credits the threat of license revocation as a vital tool for
ensuring good behavior. Without that stick, he and City Attorney Rick
Duvernay argue, the city has no way to control the side effects of
medical-marijuana sales. The city attorney thus recommends a citywide
shutdown of all co-ops and collectives, effective Dec. 1.

The city has no good options here. An October ruling by a state Court
of Appeal ruled that city licensing schemes like Redding's are
illegal, insofar as they authorize an activity - marijuana sales -
that federal law bans without exception. That ruling is binding state
law, at least this week, and the city cannot very well ignore it -
even though the city of Long Beach appealed the ruling to the
California Supreme Court.

But forcing an immediate closure - even though the city always said it
would revoke licenses if the law made them illegal - seems a hasty
overreaction. It's more likely to send medical-marijuana sales into
hiding than actually reduce them. And if the city actually tries to
enforce the new ordinance, it will likely provoke an expensive legal
fight. The city would probably win eventually, but enforcement and
litigation would also absorb scarce local resources in a battle that
the Supreme Court might yet render moot.

City officials are right to fear an increase in nuisances without the
police oversight that the city's licensing ordinance allowed. They
should be on close watch for bad behavior and lean hard on operators
who allow it.

But the city's two-year experiment with licensing has already shaken
out the worst operators and created norms of good behavior that help
us manage this legal gray zone, which won't go away even if a few
marijuana-leaf signs in strip malls come down.

Rather than rush into a decision in a field where legal rulings change
the law seemingly by the week, it seems like a time to wait and see
what both less-regulated co-ops and the courts do.