Pot club finds home on wharf
SAN FRANCISCO – Fisherman’s Wharf is home to cable cars, postcard views of Alcatraz and the scent of sourdough. And now the fragrance of fresh marijuana?
City planners are considering whether to issue a permit for a medical marijuana dispensary in the heart of the city’s tourist hub, despite outrage from neighbors and businesses. The Planning Commission is scheduled to vote today, and some have vowed to appeal any permit the city grants.
“The wharf is San Francisco’s Disneyland,” said Rodney Fong, president of the Fisherman’s Wharf Merchants Association. “About half the people who come are with kids, and the things they are looking for are family attractions – sea lions, dining. So a marijuana dispensary doesn’t really match the market we have.”
The Green Cross is the first cannabis club to seek a permit under strict guidelines the city adopted in November to curb street crime around its roughly 30 dispensaries and prevent sales to non-patients.
This left-leaning city quickly became a hub for cannabis clubs after voters in 1996 made California the first state to legalize medicinal marijuana. But the Fisherman’s Wharf fight highlights difficulties in the 11 states that allow medical marijuana as they seek to regulate the drug without banishing patients to dark alleys and rough neighborhoods.
The city made the Green Cross close its previous location in the Mission District in March after neighbors complained about rising traffic and crime, which owner Kevin Reed said were unfounded. He said he was forced into the wharf after being rejected by dozens of other landlords.
“Nobody wants this in their backyard,” Reed said.
Mayor Gavin Newsom said Reed has been responsible and should not be punished for flaws in the new rules, calling it an “unintended consequence” that the club wound up at the wharf.
San Francisco’s clubs were largely unregulated before the new rules, and according to some accounts, non-patients could freely acquire marijuana.
Now the owners of dispensaries must submit to criminal and employment background checks, pay for a permit and business license, and are forbidden from operating within 500 feet of schools. That buffer zone grows to 1,000 feet if pot smoking is allowed on the property, as it is at most San Francisco dispensaries.