The Boulder Creek Collective, tucked in the back of the San Lorenzo Valley on the winding ribbon of Highway 9, sits 550 feet from a preschool. That’s 50 feet too close, according to a county ordinance passed by the board of supervisors this year, leaving Marc Whitehill, who runs the collective, two options—shut down or move shop. “You’ve got to submit to the process,” says Whitehill, director of operations for the collective, which hopes to move early next year.
Under the ordinance, dispensaries that are less than 600 feet from a school or 800 feet from another club have until May—one year from the ordinance’s passage—to complete their moves. Whitehill has filed a permit for the Soquel location where he’d like to set up. There he hopes to expand the operation from 400 paying patients to between 1,200 and 1,500 patients. He also wants to provide medicine to between 120 and 150 compassionate care patients, who get their pot free of charge. To oversee those operations, Whitehill is setting up a board of directors with 10 seats, six of them for people with no financial interest in the nonprofit.
In what has been a very eventful year for medical marijuana, Whitehill is trying to beef up the collective’s medical and nonprofit credentials and protect it from the long arm of the the federal government. “The feds are looking at us and saying, ‘They’re just a bunch of stoners hiding behind medicine,’” says Whitehill, “and no one’s done anything to battle that perception.”
The Boulder Creek Collective, which hasn’t decided on a new name, will have a hearing through the county planning department on the new location in December. If the move goes through, the collective might prove to be an exception among clubs that are being forced to move under the county ordinance. East Coast Evolution and Central Coast Wellness, both in Felton, plan to shut down because they are too close to the Quail Hallow Montessori School off Highway 9. Crème De Canna on Paul Sweet Road in Soquel also must move or close but did not have any comment.
“It’s like musical chairs,” say Pat, who runs Central Coast Wellness and would only give his first name. “There’s only so many chairs.” He says that two different places he was hoping to move fell through because potential landlords feared the Department of Justice might be stepping up its game. He notes the county law, which also prohibits a club within 300 feet of a residential zone, will make it hard for clubs to exist anywhere in the San Lorenzo Valley.
2011 has been an interesting year for medical marijuana nationwide. This past summer, the Obama Justice Department started backpedaling from a 2009 memo in which it had said it wouldn’t pursue medical pot cases. The department gave the Drug Enforcement Agency a green light to keep going after big medical marijuana distributors—something it hadn’t ever stopped doing anyway.
And at a recent press conference, San Francisco’s U.S. attorney Melinda Haag announced the department will go after dozens of the clubs that use medical marijuana “to make extraordinary amounts of money.” Haag sent letters out threatening to seize the property and bank accounts of landlords and club owners that don’t comply. The Justice Department has already done just that to two clubs in Sacramento.
“They’re harvesting the low-hanging fruit right now,” says Whitehill, referring to the feds going after the club owners obviously violating California law and making big bucks. When they have eliminated those, Whitehill expects them to target clubs that don’t expand their research and compassionate care programs. That would force the field to get medical—and fast. With varying degrees of rigor, some medical cannabis-related facilities, including the Boulder Creek Collective and SC Laboratories, a third-party analytical laboratory in Capitola, have already started testing for potency and pesticides.
On top of changes at the federal level, a California court earlier this month threw medical marijuana a curve ball of its own. An appeals court in Southern California ruled that local governments have no business regulating or licensing cannabis clubs—potentially throwing both the county and city’s medical marijuana laws into question.
But the way Whitehill sees the situation, it will only be a matter of time before marijuana is legal in California. If that happens, he wants to position himself as a go-to supplier and keep growers the county. “That’s what we’re about,” Whitehill says, “trying to be an agency that will work with Santa Cruz County [so] that—when prohibition ends—we keep cannabis in Santa Cruz as a cash crop, as a potent agricultural entity, and not just for its medicinal purposes.”
Ben Rice, who spent eight years defending the Wo/Men’s Alliance for medical marijuana against the federal government, says legalization could be a long way off and remembers hearing the similar talk in the 1970s. “Everybody thought it was going to be legal in just a short time, and Richard Nixon pumped the war on drugs,” says Rice. “There’s just no way of telling if we’re going to see legalization in our lifetimes.”
