LA City Council votes unanimously to ban MMJ dispensaries

Here we go again.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/07/2...posal-to-ban-marijuana-shops/?test=latestnews

 

Skip why are you discriminating against other gangs? Do you only represent the red gang? THIS IS MARGINALIZING OTHER GANGS FEELINGS

 

It's going to be interesting to see what the Feds will do if we totally legalize MJ here on the upcoming ballot. Totally. No restrictions except being 21. Anyone will be able to grow AS MUCH as they want. We'll see---if it passes.

 

I think he's referring to this guy:



I hear that the area around West Hollywood has some pretty good pot.

 

Whenever we'd drive up the coast into Oregon, my dad would sing this song: ""There'll be apples on each branch in Oregon; there'll be valleys filled with golden grain. There'll be cattle on each ranch in Oregon; and there'll be plenty of sun and rain." "

Updated version:
"There'll be colas on each branch, in Oregon,,"

 

Note of clarification:
For you younger members of the audience, "colas" is an archaic term for nice, big, juicy flower buds of the cannabis plant. So when you hear one of us oldtimers saying something such as "There'll be colas on each branch" know that it is a reference to big sticky, skunky-sweet smelling buds of cannabis goodness, not cans of soda.

 

I wonder if this will stick.
The city stands to lose a good chunk of tax $$$.

 

I think the whole thing is fucked, having these shops are not hurting a damn thing & it is actually bringing them in money, so I dont see wtf the big deal it. They should just leave it alone. That's my opinion on that ..lol..

 

im sure there were a lot of gosh-darns

 

I'm so angry over this. As a member of the medical marijuana patients who lives in Los Angeles this is a fucking nightmare. I want to grow it so I can provide safe access to others who are now going to be harmed by this. Although the act really is potentially dangerous as it could attract heat from both authorities and cannabis sellers who think I may be coming in on their turf.

The truth is it should be legal in the first place but these politicians are just acting like idiots. Marijuana has only helped the city and when the cannabis shops go away all they'll do is leave storefronts that aren't being housed with businesses meaning real estate brokers will be sitting on empty buildings that won't be filled. Everyone's going to lose in this situation except for the criminals.

Got to love the idiots in power, right?

 

Organized Crime wins again.

 

yeah rite...

 

There needs to be a way to combat this. Civil disobedience isn't cutting it because they'll beat down those that stand in front of the stores. This is Los Angeles, cops don't know what due process means.

 

Man havent hear the mention of colas in a coons age.

 

Totally disagree with what they are doing in LA! People neep to contact their council members and sound off. Hopefully the court will rule this down. What a trajedy if the council goes unchecked by voters and whatnot.

 

You mean the city council that was elected by the voters?

This is the issue with spending too much time in an overly pro marijuana bubble. Now, let me preface by saying this decision is beyond asinine, it's a knee jerk reaction. I mean shit LA should be the one city that knows from experience not to put more drugs back onto the damn streets. But really, this is something more pragmatic stoners have been saying for a while, there were too many dispensaries in LA, it was making a mockery of the entire system. Reminder, most people voting for decriminalization or legalization are in fact not actually smoking marijuana. Most probably have at one point, and maybe will again, but at the same time most start to think it's ridiculous when marijuana dispensaries have become the biggest single business in the city. There is around 800 dispensaries in the city of LA. LA has around 3.7 million people. If we go with the national average of around 12% of the city smoking marijuana in any given year, that's one dispensary for about every 560 people, and that only applies if those 560 people are smoking weed all year long. That is a ridiculous number of dispensaries. It doesn't matter if the demand is enough to keep them all in business. This is public relations. You're trying to ease social acceptance of a drug into regular every day life, a drug that even just 2 years ago a slim majority of people in California voted against legalizing, and even those that voted for legalization don't want to see dispensaries all over the place.

 

QFT +over 9000!

800 of any type of store in 1 city is ridiculous.. probably not even 800 places to get your normal prescription filled!

And who's to say that none of those dispensaries were not ran by organized crime? are you seriously going to believe that there was no one pissing in the public pool?

 

What I was told is that if they capped sale of any drug at $45 at the dispensary than it meant that it was getting some deals on the side as you couldn't keep any dispensary open by selling your highest product at $45. You wouldn't be turning a profit. So yes there were some that were doing just that and were probably run by criminals. However, most of the stores are actually ran by people who want to get into the business.

Yes many are stoners themselves. Also many don't follow all of the regulations. Most of them don't make you pay state tax but because its a state law and the state needs to make money on it, technically they should. The weed at all dispensaries have to be checked out by scientists generally speaking and I'm sure most dispensaries do it to check the quality of their weed but some may not follow that.

Do we need that many dispensaries in Los Angeles? That's not what matters as some dispensaries will go out of business if they can't meet costs to stay open, to buy decent product to sell to its customer base, and pay employees. So really, that shouldn't matter as dispensaries are not exempt from going under like any other business. They aren't illegal (except by federal level) but there is no crime brought there except for those that planned to commit illegal acts near the dispensary like any other place in Los Angeles. What should matter is providing a commodity to people whom are in need of the product in a safe manner.

Ask them if they should ban liquor stores because that brings a lot of crime to a neighborhood and see how fast they'll say no it doesn't.

 

*facepalm*
It matters entirely, and this is the epitome of why liberals constantly fail at controlling the message, because we collectively suck at public relations. This isn't pizza we're talking about, it's marijuana, and no, it's not a herb, it's a drug. It's a drug that even California narrowly voted to keep illegal in 2010. Nobody kids themselves about the dispensaries, everyone know medical marijuana in California is de facto legalized weed, and people were ok with it, until they started to be more marijuana stores than there are, well, basically anything else. I mean c'mon, going onto your quote below about liquor stores, there were over twice as many marijuana dispensaries than there were liquor stores in LA.(Though to be fair that's skewed in California due to almost anywhere being able to sell alcohol, but at the same time, in a given year, near 90% of people across all ages will consume alcohol, while with marijuana it's between 10-12%, and mostly concentrated among younger people). It was obvious people were ok with de facto legal marijuana, yet as people have been warning for a while, that many weed stores were just turning off people. Like I said, people who support legalization, and people who even currently smoke(including myself) were finding it ridiculous because of how many dispenaries were popping up in LA. It was just plain ridiculous from a public relations point of view. When you get to the point LA was at, it begins to lose you a lot of support among even among people who support it. Even if they actually toke up in their rooms after their kids go to sleep, people don't want to walk their kids down the street and have them pass 18 dispensaries on the way to wherever, America isn't ready for that yet.

1. Like it or not, alcohol us substantially more socially acceptable
2. Even with alcohol being far more socially acceptable, there are substantially fewer liquor stores in LA than current marijuana dispensaries
3. This actually happens all the time. While areas that are dry cities/counties obviously can't stop, liquor stores are regulated in how close they can be to schools and parks among other things, and more importantly, local communities often fight tooth and nail to stop liquor stores. Heck one community in my city did it two years ago and that was just to stop the expansion of one, specifically for the fact it's well known that liquor stores do in fact bring in crime and decay. In fact, here's a study done exactly on that in LA itself
http://websv03b.colgate.edu/portaldata/imagegallerywww/2050/ImageGallery/teh_jobmktpaper.pdf

and it doesn't matter if marijuana is obviously no where in par with liquor in terms of causing social problems. People still don't want to drugs of any sort being sold on every corner.