9/27/2011
Harborside Health Center, which occupies around 6,000 square feet in an industrial park in North San Jose, is one of the largest “cannabis collectives” in the city.
However, although Harborside is occupying a space equivalent to three average houses, it must expand to about five times as large to comply with a proposed new measure requiring medical marijuana providers to grow all their products on-site. The proposed law will be considered by the City Council on Tuesday.
James Anthony, an Oakland attorney who represents a number of San Jose pot clubs, said, “It’s not pragmatic or workable.”
The council meeting on Tuesday will mark another major milestone in the two-year odyssey of San Jose at trying to make medical marijuana a legal product. Some of the questions that needed to be resolved by the council are the issues on where the marijuana will come from, how many pot collectives should be allowed to operate, how the city will select which collectives will continue and which will be shut down, and the place where collectives will be allowed.
If approved, the proposed rules would signal the first formal recognition of medical marijuana businesses in San Jose since the late 1990s, when the city permitted zoning for them after voters decided to make California the first state to sanction medical marijuana.
However, for much of the past ten years, San Jose was perceived to be hostile toward medical marijuana.
Patients with doctors’ approval to use the drug had to travel to Berkeley, Santa Cruz and San Francisco to buy pot from dispensaries allowed by those cities to operate.
Two years ago, the idea of regulating the clubs in San Jose was revived by Councilman Pierluigi Oliverio and last year, he sponsored a victorious city ballot measure to levy the collectives.
