Local Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Reportedly Having Trouble Being Legal Businesses

Remember way back in April when Gregoire vetoed huge chunks of SB 5703? The law would have granted additional protections for medical marijuana patients and practitioners, but the veto rendered it useless at best. The City Council tried the best it could for dispensaries to be legal, taxable businesses under city law. Three months later, only 68 out of 105 of the city's operating medical marijuana dispensaries are following those city guidelines, the city's business licensing division tells Cienna over at the Slog.

Keeping with the city's tradition of not prosecuting marijuana offenses, despite some occasional computer errors to the contrary, the city is contacting the dispensaries to gently remind them. Dispensaries, unless we get some sort of federal medical marijuana reform, are always going to be a federal liability -- so operating outside the law comes with the territory. But bolder public behavior from the city's dispensaries, like less nuanced advertising such as that in The Stranger, implies a known safer environment for medical marijuana users. The question remains: did the dispensaries not know the law, do they just not care, or did they maybe just forget?

Lack of a business license is, allegedly, not the only local law the dispensaries are breaking, either: The Stranger also reports that seven land-use and fire-code complaints have been lodged against dispensaries recently.

As someone who wants to see a healthy crop of dispensaries continue to grow in Seattle, I beg of you: get it together. We're one of the few cities in the state that can still have such dispensaries, ones like Ambrosia, that deliver and describe strains of marijuana as if they are fine wine. Let's set a good example for the rest of the state and the country: regulate and tax, and allow yourself to be regulated and taxed.