David Campos Pledges to Fix Medical Cannabis Dispensary Act 'Typo'

Playing defense

Just a few weeks after SF Weekly wrote of discord and non-action on the San Francisco Medical Cannabis Task Force -- the city's medical marijuana advisory body -- it has finally responded.

It's presenting us with a litany of past accomplishments while taking action to further its record of success -- and it's enlisted a city supervisor to help it do so.

Supervisor David Campos, the author of the bill that created the Task Force, attended the body's most recent meeting Friday and promised to craft legislation that will fix some snafus in the city's Medical Cannabis ordinance.

Chief among them is a typo in the Planning Code.

This seemingly innocuous clerical error -- a single letter -- has been used to revoke a permitted Sunset District medical cannabis dispensary's license to dispense medical marijuana, and there's no reason to believe it won't be done to block other dispensaries.

Another problem encountered by the six-month-old Medical Cannabis Task Force is its seeming inability to get other city departments to respond to inquiries on time; a letter was sent to the City Attorney in November asking for assistance in clearing up several issues, including the typo, enforcement of unlicensed delivery services, and some land-use questions.

The City Attorney did not bother to respond to the letter until February. Campos pledged to be the task force's liasion between both city departments and other elected officials, making the District 9 supervisor the bona fide go-to guy for the city's medical cannabis community.

(Oddly, the man who wrote the legislation with the typo -- Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, whose 2005 Medical Cannabis Act had been his main claim to fame -- is not carrying that particular bucket of water).

Campos' new role is perhaps partly due to SF Weekly's article; but a letter penned by Patrick Goggin, an attorney who sits on the Task Force, is definitely a direct result of the article.

"Unlike many City task forces and advisory commissions, we have reached quorum at each of our meetings," Goggin wrote. "We estimate that 90 percent of our votes are unanimous, despite our so-called 'long-lasting feuds.'"

He added that the Task Force has posted on its Web site a detailed list of "best practices" for growing cannabis in San Francisco, and it plans to provide to the city a report in July with recommendations for citywide cultivation plans that won't result in a messy situation involving U.S. attorneys.

"The synthesis of diverse perspectives from the medical cannabis community may be taking time, but indeed progress is afoot at the Task Force," Goggin concluded.

Good to know. 

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