Moratorium on Pot Clubs Fails to Fly

A moratorium on medicinal marijuana clubs proposed by city officials has gone up in smoke because City Council members could not agree whether the ban should apply to activist Andrea Nagy’s pot outlet.

After a lengthy hearing that included testimony from two dozen pot patients and medicinal marijuana advocates, but not a single opponent, council members late Tuesday twice failed to muster the four-fifths vote needed to pass a 45-day “urgency ordinance” proposed by the city attorney’s office.

When Councilwomen Elois Zeanah, Linda Parks and Judy Lazar voted to have the ban exclude Nagy, a 27-year-old legal secretary who began distributing marijuana out of a Thousand Oaks strip mall to sick people this fall, Mayor Mike Markey and Councilman Andy Fox refused to support it.

In a last-ditch effort to salvage the moratorium, Lazar--who rarely sides with Zeanah and Parks--then withdrew her insistence that Nagy’s business be exempted. Although not passing a moratorium could affect the public safety of all of Thousand Oaks, protecting Nagy would only benefit her 28 clients, Lazar said.

But the second vote also failed, 3 to 2, after Zeanah and Parks refused to shut down a medicinal marijuana outlet that they said is clearly helping sick people, adding that police offered no evidence of wrongdoing there.

“I don’t want us to step on legal quicksand, and I believe that by shutting down this club, we are inviting litigation,” Zeanah said. “This city has been getting sued a lot lately.”

Instead, council members approved a proposal by Zeanah to have city officials study the effects on their community of Proposition 215--the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, which allows people to use marijuana for medicinal purposes--without placing a temporary ban on medicinal pot clubs.

“I’m very happy,” Nagy said as she left the council chambers, surrounded by a crowd of more than a dozen marijuana activists, lawyers and cheerful supporters. “I’m glad that sensibility prevailed, eventually.”

A lawyer handed Nagy five $1 bills as she left, the result of a wager on the meeting’s outcome, which Nagy had confidently predicted.

“I never thought that would happen,” the man said. “Not in this city. Wow!”

Markey, who expressed concern about allowing marijuana dispensaries of any kind in Thousand Oaks, said he was disgusted by the council’s inability to reach a consensus on a moratorium.

“I guess we’re not going to have any moratorium,” Markey said to his council colleagues. “Twenty [cannabis clubs] could open in the city, and we’ll have serious problems.”

Fox, citing federal anti-drug policy, also voiced opposition to medicinal marijuana uses and criticized Zeanah and Parks for what he saw as an attempt to play both sides of an issue.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” Fox said. “By not voting for a moratorium, then voting to have staff look at [the issue]--that’s really a shell game.”

Deputy City Atty. Jim Friedl said in a report to the council that Thousand Oaks needs to review the many zoning and safety issues that a medicinal marijuana outlet raises.

“In what zone should this use be located?” Friedl wrote. “Could it be near a school, a church, a day care facility? What personal or professional qualifications should be required of an operator and/or staff of such a facility? How, and under what conditions, would the marijuana be grown, processed, transported, stored and distributed? What security measures are necessary to protect against attempted theft?”

Sheriff’s Cmdr. Kathy Kemp, who serves as Thousand Oaks’ police chief, said she agrees with city officials that time is needed to study the issue. Her deputies, she said, had yet to even take a look inside Nagy’s business, because it had been closed every time they called or stopped by.

But Nagy and her supporters, who said they have no problems with Thousand Oaks enacting regulations on medicinal marijuana clubs, argued a different point: that by closing Nagy down while doing the legal legwork, city officials would hurt people who need the drug to relieve pain.

Andrea Shrednick of Westlake, one of several clients of Nagy’s to testify, told council members how marijuana helped her deal with a debilitating condition that caused pain to surge through her hands and feet and often prevented her from even doing the dishes.

Another woman complained of being hopelessly addicted to Valium and other antidepressant drugs--until she found that a small amount of marijuana could ease her pain.

“I took one bong hit of that stuff,” the woman told the council, “and the pain went away.”

Afterward, Parks said she had heard ample reasons to keep Nagy’s pot club open while the regulatory issues are being studied.

“I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water,” Parks said. “I see some definite need here, and I don’t want to take anything away from anyone that helps them maintain their dignity. . . . We have heard some powerful stories here.”