The following e-mail was sent to us by San Francisco’s Americans for Safe Access Chapter. Here is the message pasted below:
SAN FRANCISCO — Sept. 20, 2010 — San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, along with other Supervisors and medical cannabis patient advocates will gather in front of San Francisco City Hall at 12 p.m. on Tuesday, September 21, 2010, for a press conference to address a legal loophole in the City’s current medical cannabis dispensary ordinance that has patients in San Francisco on alert. The SF Board of Supervisors will then introduce an emergency resolution at its 2 p.m. meeting the same day.
Potential operators from other parts of the State, mostly Southern California, are attempting to purchase buildings in San Francisco that house permitted dispensaries. Their goal is to push out the current dispensary and move in their own using the City’s Letter of Determination as an alleged legal loophole according to Shona Gochenaur, Executive Director of Axis of Love San Francisco, a medical cannabis patient advocacy and social services organization.
“This resolution sends a message that San Francisco will not tolerate this type of predatory behavior from opportunists who want to make a mockery of our local medical cannabis laws,” Gochenaur states. The new building owners’ tactic is to extort money from the resident collective or raise the rent so high they can’t afford to stay. “We will fight to protect our compassionate providers,” she continues.
Degé Coutee, Executive Director of Patient Advocacy Network, a Los Angeles-based medical cannabis patient education and advocacy organization states she is not surprised to learn operators driven out of LA are looking elsewhere. “There is great fear that if Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley is elected State Attorney General in November, San Francisco will be the only safe haven for medical cannabis,” explains Coutee. “Cooley has made it quite clear that he will shut down safe access statewide. SF appears to be the only city ready to fight a bully like Cooley. Let’s hope he’s not our next Attorney General,” Coutee
concludes.
For more information contact Shona Gochenaur at (415) 240-5247.
