The Seattle officials proposed “doing something” about the over 300 completely uncontrolled and untaxed medical marijuana operations in the city. [I maintain that these places are the primary source for the black market]. No doubt their proposal was a gambit to force the state into passing laws to deal with this problem but they ran the risk of actually implementing something if the state didn’t cooperate.<\/p>\n
As is completely normal in Seattle, a group of stakeholders were assembled to represent differing viewpoints while drawing up policy guidelines. And, as normal, these stakeholders were campaign donors, noisy single-issue gadflies, published op-ed contributors, and a couple of MMJ operators willing to stick their neck out. No one from the legal recreational side with intimate knowledge of the state’s rules.<\/p>\n
One proposal was a 500-foot rule for siting these operations. (Must be 500 feet from places where children gather). Federal guidelines specify 1000 feet, which is a huge obstacle to overcome when siting regulated recreational facilities, especially in the dense and hilly west coast cities. Licensed recreational operators immediately called foul.<\/p>\n
Then the state pointed out that it was not legal for the city to license and regulate MMJ operations. That right is reserved to the state, which does nothing.<\/p>\n
I understand the theatrics by Seattle here, but if they had put a tad more effort into this it might have worked as a threat to the state better. And if they did find themselves actually having to implement something, there was a chance it might’ve worked.<\/p>\n
I like the approach Tacoma and Spokane are taking with their version of the threat: Close them all down right now and deal with legal fallout later. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Seattle officials proposed “doing something” about the over 300 completely uncontrolled and untaxed medical marijuana operations in the city. [I maintain that these places are the primary source for the black market]. No doubt their proposal was a gambit to force the state into passing laws to deal with this problem but they ran […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1037,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions\/1037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}