By Estephania Baez
Located just a few feet from the San Diego-Tijuana border in Otay Mesa is A Green Alternative, the first medicinal marijuana dispensary in San Diego; it required a $250,000 investment and was approved by City Council after meeting all the land-use requirements, something no other shop had managed to do until now.
“This is the first one approved by the whole process, from City Council to the Planning Commission to the Police Department, everything. It has been a long process; in fact, we started a year ago. The first thing we had to do was to get a physical address, so we started renting this place – literally since this past March – then we started with the Planning Commission and had to make sure we met all the requirements” expressed Bob Walder, Executive Director of the A Green Alternative marijuana dispensary.
Although medicinal marijuana use was approved in California back in 1996, no dispensaries had yet been approved in San Diego, due to the fact that the city had set such strict ordinances that points of sale were considered illegal. However, the City government has announced new measures for the approval of these shops, provided they are not located within 100 feet of a residential area, or within a thousand feet of schools, libraries, religious temples, parks, or youth facilities, among other regulations.
In addition, in order to allow dispensaries to legally operate within San Diego, Councilmembers voted in favor of making additional reviews throughout the year to check employees’ backgrounds and regularly have the product tested. Several associations and community members expressed their concerns regarding the requirements, assuring that they were not as strict as they needed to be.
“We are a healthy community. Locating a marijuana dispensary near our children will bring gang members, drug addicts who do not belong here, causing a nuisance to our community”, said Josefa Sanchez, a mother who lives in San Ysidro.
“It might benefit the shop owners, but not the economy of San Diego residents, as the owners say. The government should do something; they talk about new restrictions, but the use of this drug goes up year after year, according to studies done by experts.” – Pedro Orso, Otay Mesa businessman.
Although community members demand stronger restrictions, the City government has severely punished those who have tried to sell this product without proper approval, as clearly evidenced by the fine imposed by San Diego’s District Attorney’s Office on the owners of a Pacific Beach marijuana dispensary for a total $835,000 – the equivalent of two years of operation as set by a Federal Judge who stated that it is $2,500 dollars for each day that it operated illegally. This was one of 290 dispensaries shut down by authorities since 2011, all of them for operating without proper approval.
The new ordinance sets forth that only 4 marijuana dispensaries will be allowed per district, for a total of 36 throughout the city. In San Diego, two more dispensaries have been approved in addition to the one already operating in Otay Mesa, one in Kearny Mesa and the other in San Ysidro. The latter has caused a lot of controversy among the residents of this community, due to the influx of people already experienced in the area; further, the tourism sector assures it will attract customers from both sides of the border.