The Riverside County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to prohibit medical marijuana dispensaries, calling them magnets for crime and citing federal laws prohibiting the drug.
Critics say many dispensaries are becoming magnets for crime; they point to some recent burglaries and shootings either at pot shops or near then [sic]
San Diego police chief William Lansdowne, who has generally supported medical marijuana, said that the dispensaries had become “magnets for crime” such as burglaries and robberies.
Knabe said he feared that, unregulated, dispensaries could become magnets for crime and illegal drug dealing and that the region could “become inundated’ with marijuana dispensaries like West Hollywood has.
Previous ordinances have failed to stop the proliferation of dispensaries – now estimated at 800 or more. Some are located near schools and residential neighborhoods and have become magnets for crime.
Four years ago, when the Los Angeles City Council started to wrestle with how to control medical marijuana, there were just four known storefront dispensaries, one each in Hancock Park, Van Nuys, Rancho Park and Cheviot Hills.
Now, police say there are as many as 600. There may be more. No one really knows.
When the state passed a law allowing for medical-marijuana cooperatives in 2004, Los Angeles never set forth guidelines for how they should operate. That led to the rampant growth of dispensaries: The number in the city is estimated at 1,000, making medical marijuana one of the city’s fastest-growing industries.
So with 1,000 of these “magnets for crime” infesting the city of Los Angeles, what has the result been?
Authorities say the 2009 crime rate in Los Angeles was the lowest in 50 years, with drops reported in everything from homicides to car thefts.
Police Chief Charlie Beck said Wednesday the number of homicides dropped more than 18 percent last year compared with 2008. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa says the 314 reported homicides were the fewest since 1967.
Overall, there was a 10.8 percent drop in violent crimes and an 8 percent dip in property crimes even though the city’s economy sagged and unemployment rose.
Rapes were down about 8 percent and auto thefts plunged nearly 20 percent.
I’m not claiming that the medical marijuana dispensaries are the main cause for the crime drop. It’s certainly possible it played some role, but as the linked article later mentions, crime rate decreases were seen across the nation. But what’s perfectly clear is that the 1,000 medical marijuana dispensaries that set up shop within the city limits in only a few short years didn’t become “magnets for crime”. If they did, there’s no way we’d be seeing declines this remarkable.
Earlier today, the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee made history today by approving Tom Ammiano’s marijuana legalization bill. It was the first time that a bill to re-legalize it has moved forward. Tomorrow, it’s Washington’s turn. I think it was fitting that it was their Public Safety Committee that voted for it. The myth that legalized marijuana distribution will lead to increases in crime is way past its expiration date. In fact, legalizing and regulating marijuana is widely expected to do the opposite. Hopefully, we’ll have a genuine debate tomorrow that spares us from the sight of our state representatives warning us that the proposed state liquor and marijuana stores will become “magnets for crime”.
Aint’ it strange how all the righties start to talk about the exact same thing, at the exact same time, using the exact same language?
@1
Yeah, it’s amazing! How does that happen? :)
let’s get high and listen to the beatles.
@1: Perhaps they really are the pod people.
@3
And you’re not a boomer? :)
Oh for GODS f**kin sake people. The “burglaries and shootings and crime” is because there’s a HUGE HUGE HUGE illegal black market for the drug. So people WILL steal it to sell it to all their ‘customers’. It’s the circular logic of this nonsense. We must make or keep pot illegal, because of the crime involved around it…which is because it’s illegal and sold on a black market instead of stores like whiskey (re: history). So because there’s a lucrative black market, run by criminals OF COURSE, that’s the reason we must keep it illegal. What the F**K!?
I am SICK AND TIRED of gangs. Lets kill them. Drug sales are almost entirely their funding. You take that away, what, are they gonna switch to dice games in the corner of some alley like baddies from the 1930s? Lets just remove the funding mechanism for these gangs. This would be MOST of the drug war in Mexico. Done. How many billions and lives lost have we spent fighting this for decades with NO effect? Lets just stop it cold…once and for all. Didn’t work to fight whiskey this way.
#3 That’s better than “lets get drunk and beat our wives, or get into a bar fight.”
When we make something illegal, it automatically generates crime. Marijuana should never have been made illegal in the first place. In the past, the worst hazard from using marijuana has been our legal system. That’s starting to change as society (finally!) realizes people have a right to enjoy this product or not. Let people do what they want if they’re not hurting anyone else. Enough Gestapo tactics already!!
Look, most police are frustrated that the justice system in this country is overworked and underfinanced. Arresting drug dealers in Seattle is an exercise in futility, as the dealers are usually back on the street dealing drugs again before the police officer finishes the paperwork. The prosecutors, public defenders, courts, and prison system don’t have the time to deal with the cases or the room to incarcerate all of them anyway.
So I don’t see any problem with making a decision that the least problematic of drugs should be legalized, if for no other reason than it gives us the capacity to deal with dealers of more harmful drugs.
But in the upper reaches of the law enforcement system, I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t a push to keep pot legal in order to justify expanding their empires and the future political ambitions of a few individuals. All they have to do is “create” a problem (“dispenseries as magnets for crime”), make a few well-publicized arrests, and then go on to bigger and better jobs on the coattails of this “success” on their resumes.
The clear implication of these media snippets is that we need to ban gas stations because they attract holdups.
@9
And think of all the kids that wouldn’t get hurt on playground equipment if we didn’t have playgrounds.
This post is endemic of ‘pot logic’; crime went down so there were no localized raises in the rates of crime. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeah.
Congratulations on winning the asshattery award for blog disinformation.
Prove it to us, get the location of the dispensaries and overlay that on top of a map showning crime responses by PD. Then overlay a 3rd layer of previous year’s data and plot the trend.
Of course you won’t, but don’t think that this BS passes as any intelligent, factual assertion.
Even if pot becomes legal, it still makes you fucking retarded, just look @ Lee
re 11: You missed the point
Great….how much you wanna bet that as soon as weed becomes legal, there will a huge spike in auto wrecks and fatalities caused by people high off their ass….same goes for workplace accidents.
good job, fools.
I dont understand some people’s obsession with drugs and getting high.
@13
I’ll take that bet in a heartbeat.
@11
LOL!
So the crime rate for the entire city plummets to record levels, but the crime rate around 1000 separate locations throughout the city saw increases?
LOL!
I’ve rarely seen dumber comments at this blog.
@14….so you think people drive better while high?
I bet you think you can drive better after a 6 pack of PBR too…..
@16,
Marijuana ain’t going away, lebowski. It’s time we come to realize it, leagalize, regulate and tax it.
@13 lebowski
I have not seen evidence that pot impairs driving. Have you?
What I KNOW does are ..
xs coffee
driving an eating
driving after a large, soporific meal
Now, if MJ fosters big eatin, maybe ????
@16
No, that’s not the error in your logic. The error in your logic is that you’ve assumed that legalization means that more people will drive stoned.
There’s no evidence to support that. Everyone in this country who would drive a car stoned is already driving their cars stoned.
@16
So are you going to bet me, or not?
@20
That’s a no, I guess. If not, feel free to shoot me an email.
@18…..then I guess you have never been stoned.
@23
Not sure how much THC one needs to have to be stoned. I have been guilty of driving while eating, driving after a fight, driving during severe hypoglycemia, driving after a caffeine overdose and driving after a too big meal. Once I got quite wierded out from pipe tobacco .. had not smoked in a long time and got a real nicotine rush.
mea culpa!
Is being stoned worse than all these?
WRT the uniformity of phraseology used by the prohibitionists (i.e. “magnets for crime”), this is hardly accidental. Just as with the news media seeming to have a ‘playbook’ in which issues dealing with cannabis are treated with sophomoric condescension (“Pot enthusiasts legislative hopes go up in smoke.”), so do the organs of law enforcement appear to have something similar.
For example, fifteen years ago the DEA used taxpayer dollars to create a manual for expected prohibitionists debates with drug law reformers. It would appear that that manual didn’t get much use, as the DEA is still in ‘evasive action’ mode when it comes to debating drug law reformers, and never updated it. But it also shows the degree of lockstep mental rigidity the prohibitionists ‘enjoy’…which is why they’re being beaten in just about every public forum.
Nice article…by reading this article i got lot of information on medical marijuana cooperatives and also new things related to this….