Pubdate: Thu, 19 Mar 2015
Source: Oregonian, The (Portland, OR)
Copyright: 2015 The Oregonian
Contact:  http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/324

POT CONTAINMENT EFFORTS BY CLACKAMAS COUNTY ARE TOO MUCH TOO SOON

Though Clackamas County voters joined Oregonians statewide in 
approving the legal sale of recreational marijuana, the county's 
elected leaders are poised to limit pot's availability. In 
tentatively approved regulations, county commissioners have advanced 
a plan to contain all marijuana sales in the county's jurisdiction to 
a few tiny urban areas. Good luck purchasing weed if you live far 
away from busy Milwaukie or Gladstone or a city that will allow it.

The county's 16 cities may yet do as they please, though most await 
rules being promulgated by the state for the implementation of 
Measure 91, which legalizes the sale of recreational pot starting next year.

The county's pot plan started as a way to limit medical dispensaries, 
whose presence prodded commissioners in April of last year to declare 
a moratorium on them. While Clackamas County commissioners in January 
allowed a handful of the county's dispensaries to reopen, the 
moratorium won't officially expire until late April - hence the plan 
to limit the venues in which pot shops can open and set conditions 
about their proximity, say, to schools.

But the big unknown world of legal recreational marijuana looms. And 
Commissioner Paul Savas argued to colleagues recently that any new 
rules applying to dispensaries also apply to the sale of recreational 
pot, made legal with the passage of Measure 91 and likely to be sold 
wherever medical marijuana is traded. Commissioners agreed.

Recreational marijuana's legalization has Clackamas County officials 
on the defensive. At a recent State of Clackamas County forum, Savas' 
fellow commissioner, Tootie Smith, noted that she'd voted no on the 
measure and said: "In Measure 91, we are not even allowed to tax 
marijuana in our county to pay for the nuisance that it will cause, 
to pay for the extra sheriff's patrols (needed) ... We are very much 
starting out at a deficit ... When you legalize a controlled 
substance .. I hope people realize it is heavily regulated."

Savas also voted no on the measure and this week told The 
Oregonian/OregonLive's editorial board that as a Clackamas County 
businessman he'd suffered his own nuisance issues with pot-smoking 
neighbors and was once forced to confront an employee whose 
performance plummeted after a lunch break featuring pot. "I don't 
like government sticking its nose in," Savas said, "but no one was 
able to help me when I faced my challenges (with marijuana users). So 
we're establishing distances and setbacks, etc." Shunting pot sales 
to a commercial ghetto, however small, solves nothing and could 
create problems of its own.

The proposed metrics are severe. They allow for only three pot 
outlets on busy McLoughlin Boulevard, and they'd bar dispensaries and 
pot shops from rural areas - much of the county is farmed or forested 
- - because of the purported difficulty of policing such realms. County 
Chairman John Ludlow said it didn't bother him that people in 
Government Camp, in the northeast corner of the county near Mount 
Hood, might be forced to drive all the way into a city to buy pot, 
The Portland Tribune reported. Meanwhile, pot outlets would not be 
allowed to be situated within 2,000 feet - nearly half a mile - of 
schools, within 500 feet of licensed child care facilities, or within 
1,500 feet of libraries, parks, liquor stores, light rail stations 
and adult foster homes. That narrows the play field quite a bit.

Measure 91 allows counties and cities to hold their own votes to 
prohibit the sale of recreational marijuana. But the measure's 
decisive passage by county residents dissuades commissioners from 
taking such a vote.

Separately, several entrepreneurs have explored buying land 
throughout Clackamas County with the expectation that 
marijuana-growing could, in time, become a booming segment of Oregon 
agriculture. That creates its own worries among some county 
officials, however, who fear marijuana's high crop value could, in 
time, devalue other croplands and give an expanding marijuana 
infrastructure the upper hand.

The fears are just that: fears. They should not guide policy-setting 
at this point. The county commission, in acting quickly to shield 
neighborhoods and public institutions, has conceived regulations 
around the negative expectation marijuana sales can only mean crime, 
complication and expense. But that hasn't been the uniform 
consequence in Colorado or Washington, though each state continues to 
tweak its marijuana-sales systems. What is clear in Kirkland, Wash., 
however, is that fear-driven siting disputes slowed to a crawl the 
establishment of the city's first and only marijuana store for two 
years - this in a city whose residents had approved legalization in 
Washington. The proverbial elephant in the room was named NIMBY, for 
Not In My Backyard.

Measure 91's stipulations need not be followed to a T. The 
Legislature's Joint Committee on Implementing Measure 91 already 
considers reconciling Oregon's medical marijuana program with a 
robust recreational marijuana trade, not to mention local taxation 
upon retail sales of recreational marijuana - something Measure 91 
expressly prohibits.

Marijuana is not by itself evil. Its uses and abuses can become 
problematic, surely, just as whiskey can fuel fights. But shunting 
pot sales to a commercial ghetto, however small, solves nothing and 
could create problems of its own.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom