I am a born and raised New York City boy who moved to Los Angeles in 1994. I was on the front lines of the Cannabis dispensary battles in L.A. during the early 2000s and now see history repeating in New York City. The comparisons of what is happening with the legal/illegal dispensaries are all too similar to the early days of Los Angeles Medical Marijuana, and it would seem no one learned their lesson from those events.
In 1996 Proposition 215, aka the Compassionate Use Act, was passed in California, allowing for the use of Medical Marijuana. Other than voting for it and wearing a pin, I was less active in that aspect of change. However, in 2003, Senate Bill 420 was passed, which opened the door for Medical Marijuana collectives, otherwise known as dispensaries. It was also the year I went to my first Americans for Safe Access meeting.
I visited the dispensaries up in Oakland and even purchased the infamous Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative (OCBC) membership I.D. card, which became a mark of superiority if you had a lower number than someone else. But I truly got involved with advocacy when dispensaries began to open in West Hollywood, right in L.A.s backyard.
Initially, the fight was always about state rights vs. federal laws, and our biggest enemy was primarily the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) But when Los Angeles city started to open up their dispensaries, the City Attorney and City Council stepped into the fray, attempting to control this emerging industry.
They drew a clear line in the sand in September 2007 when the LA City Council passed the Interim Control Ordinance (ICO). It stated that the city would recognize any dispensary that registered its shop with the city by a certain date. One hundred eighty-seven dispensaries took a huge risk and put their names on this registry, essentially proclaiming they were breaking federal law.
From then on, the “pre-ICO” dispensaries were declared legal, and any dispensary that opened afterward was a “post-ICO” and thus illegal. This clear line was the basis of all Cannabis issues in Los Angeles all the way to the recreational bill of Proposition 64 in 2016.
The City Council’s answer to fighting these illegal shops was to impose more rules on dispensaries to make them harder to open and operate, specifically concentrating on zoning and where you could be located. Unfortunately, the only people paying attention to these new rules were the one hundred eighty-seven pre-ICO legal shops.
Regardless of what the City Council came up with, the pre-ICOs would constantly adapt these new rules in order to stay legal in Los Angeles. Many of them were forced to bring in new financial partners or straight sell the dispensary to more unscrupulous community members simply because they had the money. Even with all these regulations, by 2009 there were over one thousand post-ICO dispensaries in LA, with more opening daily.
A group of dispensary operators and I formed an advocacy group called the Greater Los Angeles Collectives Alliance (GLACA). Together with Americans for Safe Access (ASA) and the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), we could simultaneously lobby the council and the government. Utilizing the “trickle-up” theory, we worked with smaller Neighborhood Councils, who would then help work on our behalf with the City Council, which worked with the district Board of Supervisors and eventually the state.
We made many positive changes and helped change the minds of our city officials. We also protected the industry from multiple banning of dispensaries, simply because the city was not interested in dealing with the problem anymore.
During those years, Los Angeles never took a truly proactive stance toward the proliferation of illegal dispensaries, and they would continue to open. Closing them down became a case of “Whack-a-Mole,” where one would shut down, and two others would open in its place. It was a never-ending cycle, and the term “Wild West of Weed” was used more than once to describe our plight in the news.
Currently, Los Angeles has over two hundred tax-paying, legal dispensaries and still almost a thousand illegal ones. They do not pay taxes or follow any rules of the state. Yet many of them carry all the same products as the legal shops at a much cheaper price.
While I have spent most of my life in California, New York will always be my home at heart. I have been avidly watching this new market and find myself amazed by the shock some people seem to have as similar problems are emerging just as they did in L.A.:
The single-digit amount of open legal dispensaries in New York City is dwarfed by the almost fourteen hundred illegal ones.
When they close one illegal shop, it just reopens again like “Whack-a-Mole.”
New York just proposed three hundred pages in regulations that only the legal shops will be required to follow.
The zoning for legal dispensaries has become harder due to costs and availability.
Now threatening the landlords is the biggest sense of Déjà vu. In 2007, for the price of a stamp, the D.E.A. shut down many dispensaries in L.A. (including my own pre-ICO) by threatening the landlords with asset forfeiture for renting out to a shop. Dispensaries were kicked out of their locations and scrambled to find new, legally zoned spots with friendly landlords.
But the threat to the property owners started to appear unenforceable. Landlords began to just ignore the letters, and nothing ever came of it.
Yet, here is New York City trying the tactic again.
I can only hope that New York City officials look to how the Los Angeles city council fumbled medical cannabis, which led to the complete quagmire of today’s dispensaries. That real advocates in New York will form a tight group of just collectives and work with their neighborhoods for that trickle-up theory to happen so that they do not go down the same path as we did.
About Oliver Summers
Oliver Summers is the Director of Retail and Compliance for Superior Herbal Health and The Clinik dispensaries. Mr. Summers has been a Los Angeles Medical Cannabis advocate since 2003. He is well known for speaking and promoting cannabis numerous times in front of city and state legislatures on behalf of patients and providers. He has owned and operated ten dispensaries in California since 2006. He is an experienced grower of boutique cannabis strains, including his own proprietary genetics.
Mr. Summers currently sits on the advisory board for Americans for Safe Access and is on the Board of Directors of the Southern California Coalition (SCC), one of the largest Cannabis advocacy groups in California. He was an original member and moderator of the Greater Los Angeles Collective Alliance (GLACA), Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), and the Patients Advocacy Network. He is a former member of the South Robertson Neighborhood Council, Pico Neighborhood Council, Melrose West Neighborhood Council, and UFCW Local 770.
Instagram: @DukeOfPicoPR
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