Don’t inhale. Yet.

It’s not easy, being an elected official.
May look like it is from the outside, as community members generally get worked up only about a single issue, one which looks to them both urgent and simple.
But few issues are simple any longer, as one action may have ramifications reaching into wholly different issues. And even on a particular issue, there are the competing interests of government regulation vs. personal freedom, that is, when and how curtailing the free actions of individuals is in the public interest. More often than not, that’s a difficult judgment call, and our representatives are quick to grasp, even if they had been aware of it intellectually, that, “You can’t please all the people all the time.”
Few issues demonstrate the truth of this observation more than the medical marijuana dispensary question soon to come before the Sonoma City Council.
Readers know that we have long favored the legalization of marijuana, though we rush to point out that we do not endorse its use. We merely note that, as a society, we bear significant costs from the prohibition against marijuana – costs similar, as we and many others have pointed out, to those associated with the prohibition against alcohol in the 1930s. Those costs include criminalization of a recreational activity enjoyed by numbers of otherwise law-abiding citizens, involvement of an increasingly organized criminal element to supply demand on the black market, and a corrupting influence on law enforcement due to the high profits.
But the issue before the council is not legalization – that’s not in their purview. The establishment of marijuana dispensaries, while certainly making pot more readily available, falls well short of legalization. Indeed, many of the elements from the Prohibition era appear, as the supply, potency and distribution of pot are still largely unregulated.
What will come before the council is an ordinance limiting the activities of businesses wanting to locate within the city limits of Sonoma. Readers know that, as proponents of private enterprise and limited government, our inclination is always to keep regulations to a minimum. The regulations proposed in this ordinance seem burdensome: limiting the businesses’ inventory to whatever its clients can grow, outside city limits; limiting the number of people who can be associated with the business; limiting the number of sales it can make. The city doesn’t regulate the number of members in a wine club, for instance, or how many sales a winery can make in its tasting room.
Of course, the council can decide to prohibit the business altogether, as it did with the private imaging lab that sought a location in Sonoma several years ago. There were other problems with that application, but a key factor in the denial was precluding the competition with Sonoma Valley Hospital. The city council considered the larger effect a business will have on the community and should consider denial in this case, too.
Pot is a multimillion-dollar industry that need not be run by criminals. Far better that the product be sold under license and with age restrictions at, say, a 7-11, rather than in the shadows by a dealer. The dispensary operations, while tempting as a first step in that direction, are not transparent enough, nor their regulation clear enough. With present efforts at the state and even federal level for true legalization, the city council should wait, in our view, for that better option.