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Lynn City Hall.
It’s time for the City Council to acknowledge the will of Lynn voters and decide where to site medical-marijuana dispensaries in the city.
Lynn residents voted 18,446-12,293 in 2012 to approve the ballot question decriminalizing medical marijuana, setting the stage for its distribution. That vote mirrored statewide voter approval of the question. For the last three months, the council has debated where to place the clinics and heard residents comment on medical marijuana without coming close to making a decision.
With an Aug. 3 deadline looming and vacation schedules taking shape, the witching hour is tonight.
Councilors have debated clinic sites even as dispensary operators presented their plans to city officials, including Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy.
Police Chief Kevin Coppinger has set the public benchmark for the clinic discussion by repeatedly stating that security must be the first concern governing city efforts to regulate medical marijuana.
Reports of crime or other problems associated with dispensaries in Salem and Lowell have yet to surface. Salem is the first Massachusetts city to host a clinic and Lowell welcomed Patriot Care’s dispensary and marijuana cultivation facility last February with a ribbon cutting.
With a once-illegal drug now a controlled, but medically-dispensable substance, it is still difficult for many people to accept the idea of dispensaries sprouting up in Lynn.
Like it or not, the council is responsible for translating the voters’ will into action. In the case of local medical-marijuana dispensaries, the panel must select sites and outline other regulations.
By narrowing potential sites for the dispensaries to the Lynnway and Western Avenue, the council has applied an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to the process.
In a city as densely settled as Lynn, that approach is only marginally successful. Locating a clinic on the Lynnway also clashes with the development potential the city hopes to maximize along the Lynnway and waterfront property abutting it.
Relegating dispensaries to the city’s corners is a classic “not-in-my-backyard” move by the council. If councilors want to select a more central location for a clinic, this newspaper is more than willing to welcome one as a Munroe Street neighbor.
An intelligent approach to finding a location is to fine-tune Coppinger’s security concerns and pick a site that will comply with the standards the chief intends to enforce.
What councilors need to do is end all the talk about legal challenges and other resistance to dispensary siting. The council in the past has needlessly waded into areas beyond its jurisdiction. Attempts to restrict where sex offenders live and the former foreclosure ordinance were forays into domains outside the city’s responsibility, and wound up in court.
By contrast, the state has set standards for medical-marijuana dispensaries and outlined provisions for local review. The time has come for the council to pick sites and carry out the rule of law set in motion by the 2012 vote.
