With the West Hollywood City Council’s decision in November to grant eight licenses to vendors of recreational marijuana and eight licenses to medical marijuana dispensaries, the question now is who will get them and where will they go?
Who will the get licenses won’t be known until after a city evaluation team finishes an extensive application review process, which is expected to begin late next month. (The four existing medical marijuana dispensaries can apply immediately for temporary licenses to sell recreational weed).
Where they will go depends on who is willing to rent to cannabis businesses, something that makes some commercial landlords nervous because the sale of marijuana still is illegal under federal law. However, where marijuana businesses won’t go was revealed today with the release by the city of a “buffer zone” map. The map displays the 600-foot zones around schools, youth centers and child day care centers where both city and state laws ban marijuana-related businesses.
One of the existing medical dispensaries, Alternative Health Services at 7828 Santa Monica Blvd., sits within the buffer zone around Fountain Day School at 1128 Orange Grove Ave. The City of West Hollywood has given AHS temporary approval to continue operating there while it seeks a new location. It also must get approval from the State of California.
The city’s recreational cannabis ordinance also authorized eight licenses for and cannabis smoking/vaping lounges and eight for cannabis eating lounges. However, such lounges must be part of an authorized medical dispensary or recreational marijuana retail shop. There also will be eight licenses granted to local delivery services.
The city has created a cannabis page on its website to keep residents and business owners up to date about the cannabis regulation process. A more detailed version of the large buffer zone map can be
downloaded here.
I was and am PRO legal pot, though not s user. Just saying, since the 1st, everytime I take my dog out, there is always overwhelming Pot smoke in and around weho. More concerning, is construction workers in Orange/Bright Green Safety Vests smoking pot on brake on the sidewalks, before going back up on scaffolding of nearby hotel under renovation.
We will soon be enveloped by a citywide cloud of weed and code compliance will be powerless to do anything.
Users will decide what idiot laws to observe and what ones to ignore. They are quite good at it. Nearly a century of moronic laws have been ignored.