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. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom