City to Darlene and Dave Matteson: DROP DEAD

Claremont Marijuana Ordinance Draft Available

Dave and Darlene Matteson at a recent city council meeting

The long-awaited draft medical marijuana dispensary ordinance is up on the City of Claremont website. Unfortunately for tenacious advocates Darlene and Dave Matteson, they wont be able to purchase their dime bags in Claremont unless they move to town from Upland: all "patients" must be Claremont residents. [sorry, it's just impossible to write this phrase without the scare quotes; there are no quotes around "patient" in the original]

Dave and Darlene in happier times

The draft ordinance, found on the City website here, comprises ten densely-packed pages. There are restrictions on the permit itself. There are lots of restrictions on operation: we like 5.50.40.A, "Operator shall not be engaged in interstate commerce of marijuana." Only home-grown bud. There are loads of operational restrictions, security measures, and enforcement provisions.

One curiosity: Section 5.50.20 is blank. It's "RESERVED", in the parlance of the City. We wondered what possibly could be missing from this lengthy exercise in rule-making. It finally hit us, and then, sure enough, the omission we came up with is addressed in Section 5, on page ten. Where is this community amenity going to be located? They don't know yet. Section 5 reads, "The Moratorium shall remain in effect until such time as the locational criteria for the establishment of a dispensary has [sic, we don't create this verbiage, we just copy it] been adopted and becomes [sic, same problem] effective."

But notice, all you vipers out there. The City will bring in an ordinance--this one--within the allotted time of the current moratorium, but it won't be complete, and Hell will effectively freeze over before the "locational criteria" are ever established. Oh, Lisa Prasse--her name appears in the document ID fields--and her cohort are clever rascals.

And if you thought the Padua Park and affordable housing wars brought out the NIMBYs, just wait until the medical marijuana dispensary comes to your neighborhood. Our suggestion: Put it on one of the college campuses; no one would notice the parking problem and town-and-gown relations would never be better.

For those of you who were not sentient in 1975, our headline came from this: