Marijuana Dispensaries

Mireya Ingham follows her favorite food trucks on Twitter so she knows when the movable feasts set up curbside in her East Hollywood neighborhood. But some recent foodie tweets are giving her heartburn: A state lawmaker wants to significantly limit where lunch wagons can operate, keeping them even farther from schools than marijuana dispensaries. That could put many of the mobile kitchens out of business just as the industry is surging with creativity. Dozens of colorfully painted trucks have hit the road throughout California, serving gourmet dishes to largely young epicures and becoming nearly as emblematic of the state as surfboards and convertibles.

California cities may not ban medical marijuana dispensaries, but the operations may sell only weed that is grown on site, an appeals court ruled in an Orange County case. The unanimous decision by a three-judge Court of Appeal panel in Santa Ana was the first in the state to prohibit cities from enacting zoning restrictions that effectively ban all marijuana dispensaries. The court was also the first to rule that dispensaries must grow the marijuana they sell, a requirement that would force most of them out of business.

On May 16, shortly after midnight, surveillance cameras mounted on the Green Room, a marijuana dispensary in Long Beach, recorded a hooded man carrying milk jugs apparently filled with gasoline. Minutes later, the man is seen running away from the burning building with his right arm on fire. The short video clip was played at a Monday news conference regarding a string of fires in the central part of town — 22 in the last six months. Authorities said they have been unable to determine if the man in the video, whom they estimate to be 18 to 25 years old and heavyset, is the serial arsonist.

A pair of U.S. governors appealed to the Drug Enforcement Administration on Wednesday to reclassify marijuana as a drug with accepted medical uses, saying current federal law makes it difficult for states that have legalized medical marijuana to safely regulate it. The petition filed by Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington and Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island asks the government to change marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II under the...

A landlord in San Diego can evict a medical marijuana dispensary because under city zoning laws, pot dispensaries are not legal anywhere in the city, a Superior Court judge has ruled. San Diego County Superior Court Judge Ronald Prager, in a decision released Monday, said it was permissible for Kimber Investment Group to evict the Medibloom dispensary from the building that the investment group owns in a Rancho Bernardo shopping center. "Cities ... are the arbiter of zoning laws," Prager wrote.

Questions on the impact of medical marijuana laws on teenagers' illicit use of the drug have been raised repeatedly by public health officials. One study suggests that allowing marijuana to be sold for medical purposes doesn't harm teens. Researchers compared teens in Rhode Island, where medical marijuana was legalized in 2006, with adolescents in Massachusetts, which doesn't allow medical marijuana sales. The analysis included 32,570 teens who completed surveys on drug use between 1997 and 2009.

A local judge on Friday upheld Los Angeles' much-contested medical marijuana ordinance, denying motions from 29 medical marijuana dispensaries that had sought to halt enforcement of the law. The decision is a major victory for the city attorney's office, which has invested considerable time and expense in defending the law from a phalanx of lawyers working for dispensaries. Superior Court Judge Anthony J. Mohr, who handles some of the most complex cases in Los Angeles County, held a series of hearings over many months on numerous constitutional challenges raised by the pot collectives.

Federal prosecutors are threatening to shut down medical marijuana dispensaries throughout California, sending letters that warn landlords to stop sales of the drug within 45 days or face the possibility that their property will be seized and they will be charged with a crime. The stepped-up enforcement escalates the Obama administration's efforts to rein in the spread of pot stores, which accelerated after the attorney general announced in 2009 that federal prosecutors would not target people using medical marijuana in states that allow it. "It's coming out of left field as far as we're concerned," said Joe Elford, the chief counsel for Americans for Safe Access, which advocates for medical marijuana use. "I really don't know what inspired this.

In a decision that could upend the way California cities regulate medical marijuana, a state Court of Appeal has ruled that Long Beach's ordinance regulating dispensaries violates federal law. The city held a lottery, issued permits to the winners and charged fees, which the three-judge panel said put it in the position of authorizing the distribution of marijuana in direct conflict with the federal Controlled Substances Act, which makes the possession...

A Rand Corp. study this week seemed to nip the conventional wisdom about medical marijuana dispensaries in the proverbial bud, contradicting statements from law enforcement officials that these facilities are magnets for crime. On the contrary, Rand researchers said, crime actually increased in the vicinity of hundreds of L.A. dispensaries after they were ordered to shut down. Does this mean that dispensaries decrease neighborhood crime rather than increasing it? Unfortunately, despite Rand's analysis, we still don't know the answer.