Cities must be able to opt out of marijuana shops

A month ago, the state Senate approved a bill with sensible rules for the prescribing and distribution of medical marijuana. Not perfect, but you could tell the senators were trying.
Since then, marijuana advocates in the House have busied themselves undermining key regulations in the Senate bill.
What ought to alarm the public most is the House’s attempt to restrict any local control of the sale of marijuana. The Senate had explicitly required that “dispensers must be licensed and approved by the counties and cities in which they are located.” It also required that they be nonprofits.
That language is gone from the House version. So-called dispensaries would be able to sell the drug for profit – and the state would have sole control over licensing. No county or city in Washington would be able to stop state-licensed commercial marijuana outlets from opening within their boundaries.
Seattle appears content to have as many medical marijuana dealers as are willing to set up shop there. But should these outlets be imposed, potentially, on any community in the state? Under the House bill, if Puyallup or Sumner or University Place don’t want marijuana retailers, tough luck.
Two other revisions in the House bill reflect the same mentality:
• The Senate was careful to protect police officers and the taxpayers from lawsuits by medical marijuana users and sellers who felt wronged by enforcement actions. Its bill required that plaintiffs establish “proof of misconduct” before collecting damages.
The House bill wouldn’t require such proof; it lets plaintiffs win on much broader grounds by arguing that officers didn’t act in “good faith” or “within the scope of their duties.” Faced with such broad liability, local governments (i.e., taxpayers) would often pay settlements rather than risk losing cases.
• The Senate made a serious effort to shut down “authorization mills” – medical clinics that do little but hand out hand out authorizations to use marijuana, sometimes offering money-back guarantees to anyone who doesn’t walk away with a license to use.
The Senate bill forbade medical practices that consist “primarily” of prescribing marijuana. (Imagine a physician whose practice consisted chiefly of prescriptions for Xanax or some other controlled substance.)
The House version substitutes “solely” for “primarily” – meaning an authorization mill could still be an authorization mill as long as the doc occasionally does something other than recommend marijuana.
These provisions – especially the attack on local control – must be scrapped in favor of the Senate’s language, which was plenty generous to legitimate marijuana patients.
As always, the issue is whether medical marijuana should operate under a real medical model or under the looser-the-better approach of the drug culture. The Senate took the paradigm a big step in the direction of medicine; the House wants to take it a step back.