SAN FRANCISCO — The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that cities and counties can ban medical marijuana dispensaries, a ruling likely to further diminish the state's once-extravagant network of storefront pot shops and fuel efforts to bring greater oversight to the quasi-legal industry.
In a unanimous opinion, the court held that California's medical marijuana laws – the nation's first and most liberal – neither prevent local governments from using their land-use powers to zone dispensaries out of existence nor grant authorized users convenient access to the drug.
"While some counties and cities might consider themselves well-suited to accommodating medical marijuana dispensaries, conditions in other communities might lead to the reasonable decision that such facilities within their borders, even if carefully sited, well managed, and closely monitored, would present unacceptable local risks and burdens," Justice Marvin Baxter wrote for the seven-member court.
The ruling came in a legal challenge to a ban enacted by the city of Riverside in 2010, but another 200 jurisdictions have similar prohibitions on retail pot sales, the advocacy group Americans for Safe Access estimates. Many were enacted in the past five years as the number of dispensaries swelled and amid concerns that many shops were thinly veiled outlets for illegal drug sales.
