Photo by clarissa.stark

Fourteen years ago, 69 percent of the District’s voters approved an initiative legalizing medical marijuana. But because of ongoing opposition in the neighborhoods where it could be grown, medical marijuana is no closer for the patients who may need it today.

Yesterday ANC 5B unanimously voted for a resolution asking the D.C. Department of Health not to approve licenses for all six of the cultivation centers seeking to locate in the area. The resolution complained of an “over concentration of a highly regulated entity, each of which has a significant likelihood of leading to increased criminal activity in the surrounding neighborhood [and] a lowering of resident’s property values.”

The resolution caps off a contentious two-month period in which Ward 5 residents complained that the overwhelming majority of proposed cultivation center sites have been eying sites in their neighborhoods. Despite protestations by hopeful medical marijuana entrepreneurs that city regulations limited them to industrial sites found primarily in Ward 5, residents, civic associations and ANCs banded together to oppose the cultivation centers; in January, the D.C. Council listened, passing legislation limiting the number of cultivation centers in any one ward to six.

The debate has also made its way into the race for the Ward 5 D.C. Council vacated by disgraced former council member Harry Thomas, Jr. Republican candidate Tim Day has asked that the council stop any licensing until a new councilmember can be elected on May 15, while Delano Hunter has sided with limiting the number of cultivation centers in the ward. Among the front-runners, only Kenyan McDuffie isn’t standing against the cultivation centers—he merely wants to ensure that any tax revenues get reinvested in the ward.

To add to this, yesterday Councilmember Yvette Alexander (D-Ward 7) informed her colleagues that she’ll be introducing legislation that would forbid the Department of Health from granting a license to a potential cultivator looking at a site 3701 Benning Road NE until 2015. “It is necessary to move this legislation, on an emergency basis, to address the immediate concerns of the residents and community that would be adversely impacted by the location of a medical marijuana cultivation center at that location,” she said in a memo to fellow councilmembers.

Both the community complaints and the council legislation are creating a tangle of complications for the Department of Health, which is charged with implementing the District’s medical marijuana program. Of 28 original applications to run the program’s 10 cultivation centers, a six-person DOH panel has whittled the list down to nine. Six are located in ANC 5B, but residents there don’t want them all. If Alexander succeeds, the sole cultivation center inside of Ward 7 will be taken off of the table altogether. That could leave the five proposed dispensaries—where patients would actually get the marijuana—short on supply.

Advocates for the program and community activists agree on one thing, though—DOH has dropped the ball by seemingly making up the rules for the tightly regulated program as it went along, and then not providing enough information to concerned community groups when they were asked to weigh in. For some, the very fate of the program is in question.

According to a recent timeline published by DOH, cultivation center licenses should be selected by the end of March, and dispensary licenses will follow closer to the summer months. While city officials have claimed that medical marijuana should be available by mid-2012, many advocates now think that that deadline is overly optimistic.