George Alvarez has been many things in his life. He’s been a certified drug counselor, a four-year commissioner on the Santa Barbara County Advisory Board on Drug and Alcohol Problems, a former Guadalupe city planning commissioner, and a distant relative of that city’s mayor.
It may seem an unlikely résumé for a man who wants to open what would be the only medical marijuana dispensary on the Central Coast.
Yet Alvarez, a 60-year-old diabetic who as a young man watched a family member waste away from cancer, says his mission is about compassion for the sick, not about the money.
“I am willing to spend the time and effort to see if it’s doable, if it will serve that population that really needs it,” Alvarez said. “I want to do everything I can to give them some human dignity before they die and to relieve any pain they might suffer from accidents, Agent Orange, or anything that a doctor says that [marijuana] will relieve.”
Alvarez said he, like Bill Clinton, has never inhaled, but he said he has witnessed the plant’s pain-relieving effects while growing up in the Mexican culture. As a child, he said, he saw his relatives use mixtures of alcohol and marijuana leaves to control their arthritis. He fears that someday his disease might cause him to reach a point where he’s in constant pain and would use marijuana as a painkiller if it were a legal option.
He said he’d kicked around the idea of opening a marijuana dispensary for more than a year, and when he heard that Guadalupe Mayor Lupe Alvarez was seeking an urgent ordinance that would place a temporary moratorium on the opening of a dispensary in that city, he decided to try to beat the clock.
He arrived at City Hall on the morning of May 12 and applied for a medical marijuana dispensary business license hours before the emergency meeting, he said. That evening, he stood before the council and argued that the city didn’t have any regulations in place regarding a dispensary when he applied and therefore the council would have to accept the application. The council disagreed.
Alvarez acknowledged that there’s no guarantee he would’ve received approval even if the council had accepted the application, but added that he should be allowed to plead his case before the Planning Commission.
“I know the rules. If there’s no ordinance in place you can’t go backwards,” he said. “I can’t understand why a city council won’t just step back and see the compassion element of what these dispensaries can do for people if they’re done appropriately.”
The city council approved the emergency measure by a unanimous 4-0 vote, prohibiting the establishment of a dispensary in the city for 45 days. Mayor Alvarez was absent.
Mayor Alvarez said George Alvarez’s application didn’t lead to the ban. Two weeks before the vote, he said, he polled fellow council members on the subject of a dispensary after getting an inquiry from another city resident. The members were opposed. After that, he decided to work for a temporary ban.
“I think the council, by their vote and by the comments that I read in the paper, it was more of: ‘We do not want to allow this to open here in Guadalupe,’” he said.
Mayor Alvarez said he’s concerned a dispensary could lead to increased crime, if only by people seeking to break in to the dispensary itself. While the community is seeking new businesses, he said he prefers family oriented and retail shops.
“I do not support Mr. George Alvarez’s interest in opening a medical marijuana dispensary,” he said. He called George Alvarez a “distant relative” but said he hasn’t worked with him on the issue.
According to Guadalupe City Attorney David Fleishman, the decision is a temporary proactive measure the council put in place to buy the city time to decide whether or not to permanently ban dispensaries outright. The council has already referred a permanent ordinance to the Planning Commission for further study. The commission will come back to the council with a recommendation on whether to regulate or extend an outright ban on medical marijuana dispensaries before the temporary ban expires.
Fleishman said Alvarez has no legal leg to stand on and his application for a business license can’t be grandfathered in because the purpose of the proposed business didn’t have an existing legal use.
“It’s an application that as of now cannot be granted,” Fleishman said. “If you want to get right down to it there is no legal entity recognized either under federal or state law known as a medical marijuana dispensary. These things have occurred in other cities but there is nothing in the Compassionate Use Act that discusses the establishment of these dispensaries.”
(While this is strictly true, in July 2008 Attorney General Edmund G. Brown, working off the law that followed the Compassionate Use Act, issued guidelines that discuss the business forms that marijuana cooperatives and collectives should take to legally cultivate and distribute physician-recommended marijuana.)
Alvarez said he wants to work with law enforcement and medical agencies in order to open up his shop under the letter of the law. He has a meeting scheduled for May 21 with Guadalupe Police Chief George Mitchell. That appears to be a moot point, however, since, according to Mitchell, the department’s stance echoes the view of its city attorney; he said he only agreed to the meeting as a courtesy.
“There isn’t a legal way to adopt a dispensary. It doesn’t comply with either state or federal law and therefore can’t operate legally by definition,” Mitchell said. “At this time I don’t believe the law allows any exception.”
According to Fleishman, dispensary owners who’ve been allowed to operate in the state generally take the position that they are caregivers of patients and submit applications for business permits as a pharmacy or medical office.
“This is not an issue of trying to overrule what the voters did,” Fleishman said, referring to the Compassionate Use Act, or Proposition 215. “We’re taking care of something that has been identified in other cities that have issues of establishment.”
California communities have wrestled with the legality of private shops that provide marijuana to patients ever since the passage of Proposition 215 in 1996. The proposition protects doctors who recommend marijuana from prosecution and provides patients with a legal defense should they be arrested for possession and cultivation of marijuana for medicinal purpose. The passage of SB420, which state legislators passed to fill in gaps left by 215, established collectives and co-ops, as well as the right of growers to be reasonably compensated.
Alvarez isn’t the first to attempt to open a marijuana dispensary on the Central Coast in recent years. Though the cities of Santa Maria, Lompoc, Solvang, San Luis Obispo, and Buellton have all passed at least temporary ordinances banning the establishment of such businesses, the rules haven’t stopped people from trying to open shops in unincorporated areas.
In April, Wishing You Wellness, reportedly the first medical marijuana dispensary to open in Northern Santa Barbara County, opened briefly in Orcutt. Located in the city’s Evergreen Shopping Center, permit problems caused the dispensary’s owners to vacate the property and the facility shut its doors for good on April 3.
Connie Jones, owner of a pet-grooming store located next door to the doomed dispensary, said she spoke with one man in the early morning hours before the shop’s closure who was too frail and weak to get out of his car.
“He said that the doctors had him on Vicodin and all kinds of painkillers, until he almost went into kidney and liver failure,” Jones said. “Finally the doctor gave him a permit to use marijuana and he said, ‘I’ve driven from far away to get it, but even though they said it was legal, you can’t find any place open that’s dispensing it because they keep shutting them down.’ He said, ‘I guess I’ll go home and take the other painkillers and die from it.’”
And before Wishing You Wellness, there was Central Coast Compassionate Caregivers, which operated for little more than a year in Morro Bay. The owner of that dispensary, Charles C. Lynch, was prosecuted in a federal court last year for growing and distributing marijuana from his shop, despite his cooperation with city authorities and local ordinances.
In a federal courtroom Lynch was convicted on five felony counts related to selling marijuana.
Lynch is due to appear for sentencing June 11. He faces between five and 100 years in prison for his role in organizing the dispensary. Each of his crimes carries a mandatory year in prison, including one count of selling to minors. The state and federal governments define minors differently, so while it’s common for California dispensers to serve people who are 18 and older, federal rules call anyone under 21 a minor.
Lynch has vowed to appeal his conviction as soon as he is sentenced.
Lynch’s saga and the past failures of other potential dispensaries haven’t done anything to dissuade Alvarez. He’s encouraged by the fact that under a new political and economic climate, the tide may be turning toward government entities backing off on their scrutiny of medicinal marijuana dispensaries.
During his campaign, President Barack Obama said that prosecuting dispensaries operating within California law wouldn’t be a priority for his administration. On March 18, the Justice Department announced that the federal government would limit raids of dispensaries to cases where the dispensaries serve as a front for drug trafficking.
California is taking the perplexing pot issue a step further. Exploring all channels to help solve the state’s budget crisis, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently said he thinks it’s time state lawmakers study the results of legalization of marijuana in other countries and open an official debate on the subject.
“If I open a shop, it’s not just going to be for the purpose of giving everyone weed. There has to be some rules and regulations working with the right organizations—the American Cancer Society and medical professionals—that don’t just disperse cards to anyone,” Alvarez said. “I have to do my homework.”
He said if the city of Guadalupe wants to battle, he’ll take his cause to the state level.
“We still have dispensaries in the state of California. If they’re still running and they were able to get them going when they had no ordinance against them, what makes Guadalupe so special?” Alvarez asked. “I have the right to pursue it.”
Even if he isn’t destined to be the one to run a dispensary, Alvarez said he’s determined to pave the way for one to open.
“This is going to be a dogfight and I want to take the lead,” he said. “If it comes out that it’s not doable and I’ve turned over every rock and did everything I can, then I can apologize to the general public and say I tried to get something done.”
Writer Kylie Mendonca from New Times of SLO contributed to this report. Contact Jeremy Thomas at jthomas@ santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 21-28, 2009.
