Medical pot lights up D.C. debate

Medical marijuana is coming to the District of Columbia - but still with too many restrictions for some pot advocates.

Now that Congress has lifted its decade-old hold on the measure, legislation to implement a 1998 voter-passed referendum is backed by 10 of the city’s 13 D.C. Council members and seems sure to pass.

Council committees and city officials are wrestling with an armful of questions about how the law will work in practice - especially the question of where the licensed dispensaries that will sell the drug can be located, and who will be allowed to own and operate them. And opponents are calling for Congress to block the measure, as it can do under long-standing federal powers over D.C. affairs.

Marijuana advocates are pushing for changes in the current council proposal, which bans anyone with even a misdemeanor drug conviction from owning or working in a dispensary, and says they must be at least 1,000 feet from any school or youth center.

Finding a site that meets that criterion in a dense urban setting like the District is like “looking for a needle in a haystack,” said entrepreneur Alan Amsterdam, co-owner of Capitol Hemp - a store in Adams Morgan that sells products made from hemp, a fiber manufactured from the non-psychoactive parts of the cannabis plant.

Mr. Amsterdam - a native Washingtonian who in 1998 opened the first American-operated marijuana “coffee shop” in the Netherlands, where pot has been legal for more than 20 years - said he plans to apply for a license to run a dispensary and has been scouting potential sites.

“Most of the options are going to be in the Northeast, the New York Avenue area,” said Mr. Amsterdam, adding that he plans to apply for a license no matter how the law turns out, but he is lobbying for changes in the bill.

He said that current proposals for regulating gun shops in the District would mandate that they must be at least 350 feet from any school.

“That doesn’t make any sense. How can you say it’s OK to put a shop which sells deadly weapons closer to a school than one which is dispensing medicine?” asked Mr. Amsterdam, who said the same 350-foot rule would significantly increase the number of potential dispensary sites.

Council member Phil Mendelson, chairman of the Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary - one of the two panels considering the bill - said he did not buy that comparison.

“I don’t think there is agreement on that issue,” he said. He noted it was not yet clear whether patients would be allowed to smoke their marijuana in the dispensaries. The location question “depends on the rules for the dispensaries,” Mr. Mendelson said.

Mr. Mendelson added it was his “inclination” to retain the ban in the bill on people with misdemeanor drug convictions owning or working in dispensaries - another provision marijuana advocates oppose.

Mr. Amsterdam said that people with misdemeanor convictions for violence or fraud are free to set up under the law.

“That is very troubling … you are punishing people in the cannabis community,” he said, adding, “You need master growers” to cultivate medical-grade pot and that people with that kind of experience have often fallen afoul of the law.

“I don’t follow that argument,” responded Mr. Mendelson, adding that the provision was intended “to make sure the criminal element cannot get involved” in supplying medical marijuana. “I don’t see why a person with a criminal conviction is the best person for the job” of running a dispensary.

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