A patient picks up prescribed medical marijuana at Herbal Remedies in Westminster, Colorado. (December 15, 2009)
An increasingly infamous stretch of South Broadway is currently home to at least nine dispensaries, operating in broad daylight beneath garish signage advertising newly named brands, each more over-the-top than the last ("Dr. Reefer", anyone?).
It is this profusion of pot dispensaries, operating under the guise of medical clinics that is now prompting -- forcing, even -- lawmakers to take action to regulate what one calls "cannabis capitalism run amok."
"It's like the Wild West out there," is the analogy often drawn by State Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, who's taken the lead on trying to pass regulations in the upcoming legislative session that will shut down those fly-by-night dispensaries while protecting those focused on offering sick, card-carrying clients the medical marijuana Colorado voters said they were entitled to use when Amendment 20 was passed in the year 2000.
"We need to control this free-for-all," Romer said. "We need to get away from the retail model and back to the medical model that voters intended."
While Romer and other lawmakers are now at work on drafting a patient-focused regulatory model, the quiet suburb of Westminster isn't waiting to act. Monday night, the city's seven-member city council voted unanimously in favor of Council Bill 41, which banned the city's two medical marijuana dispensaries on the grounds that its business was out of step with federal law. They did so after listening to nearly an hour of impassioned pleas from the owners of the dispensaries, "Herbal Remedies" and "The Healing Center", and with no explanation or public comment -- only the simultaneous push of a button and the unanimous flicker of seven green lights.
Unlike Romer and Denver city councilman Charlie Brown, Westminster's city councilors appear uninterested in engaging with constituents on either side of this issue. All of them were reportedly invited to visit both the city's dispensaries before taking any action, but none did.
Had they come Tuesday through the locked door of Herbal Remedies, a clean, well-lit and quiet dispensary tucked into the corner unit of a strip mall on 72nd Avenue just off Federal, they would have met Ron Britton, who drives twice a month from his home in Evergreen because, of the 10 dispensaries he's tried, he's most comfortable here.
"I have epilepsy and the marijuana helps with that," Britton said. "And I have a whole lot of broken bones from a head-on collision a few years back and I still have a lot of pain from that. There's specific strains of marijuana that are good for particular things. They know that stuff here, and they make sure I get what I need. There's still quite a variety [of dispensaries out there] and this place seems to be very interested in legitimate health care."
Had city councilors visited Herbal Remedies Tuesday they'd have also seen two teenagers ring the bell and tell the caregiver who opened the door that they just wanted "to check things out." They were told this was a dispensary for medical marijuana users.
Unable to produce a card indicating a doctor's approval for marijuana, they were turned away.
It was a stark contrast to what I witnessed last month at a newly opened Denver dispensary in a Capitol Hill office suite, where a 20-something owner/operator asked me if I had my own card and, when I said no, told me: "Well, it's pretty easy to get one, if you want."
"We sell medicine, we don't sell dope. We don't sell wacky tobaccky. We sell medicine," said Julia Sepulveda of Herbal Remedies. "We provide so much more than just a high. And that's what's, essentially, so heartbreaking -- being at the meeting last night and seeing our patients and The Healing Center's patients basically pleading for their livelihood and having the council, without a moments hesitation, shut us down."
"We don't have a bunch of hookahs around and a bunch of kids waiting outside. We're at a loss for words because we don't understand. We're not trying to make some sort of fantasy pleasure land. We're trying to help people. for them to turn a quote-unquote moral eye, it's just a little insulting."
At 7 p.m. Tuesday night, the neon sign in the dispensary's shaded window flashed from "Open" to "Closed." It had been exactly 23 hours since the council's approval of the ban, which, statutorily, took effect immediately, and yet a full day's customers had come and went.
"We got a lot of phone calls today from our clients, mainly just checking on us, seeing if we were still open, if we were okay," Sepulveda said. "We've just been telling them that we're going to be here for them as long as we can."
If and when police officers arrive to enforce the new ordinance and shut the dispensary down, an attorney will be waiting to file an injunction against it as soon as his phone rings. That attorney, Tae Darnell, told the council Monday night that they were picking a fight -- possibly an expensive one, when all is said and done, and the legal costs are added up.
It's not a fight Herbal Remedies wanted, but they won't be backing away.
"We're very, very proud of this business, and we're not going anywhere," Sepulveda said. "Maybe, we have to close temporarily and relocate to another city, but we believe in what we do and we're going to keep doing it."
At the Capitol, Romer promises he'll protect the business's right to do so.
"I really find it objectionable that those patients have to come to a city council meeting to fight for something that I think they have a constitutional right for," Romer said.
"We need to write rules that let individual cities make their own zoning decisions, but I think patients have a right to a clinical environment where they can get safe medical marijuana without pesticides or contaminants. Yes, we need to end the retail side of this. Hopefully, when I write that bill, Westminster will reconsider and allow a clinic in their community for those vulnerable patients."
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