Medical marijuana: Could Fort Collins ban lead to hundreds of new home grows?
The successful vote to prohibit medical marijuana retail operations in Fort Collins led to the Valentine's Day closure of all the city's dispensaries. This week, the city council formalized the ban and decided on new rules for home grows, which one member predicts could soon number in the hundreds -- an outcome that may come as a shock to the very people who nixed MMCs in the first place.
As Councilman Ben Manvel notes, "We decided to allow grows in single-family homes and leave in our standard of caregiver-plus one and twelve plants per house" -- decisions that are generating controversy, as well as litigation-threats.
"We're already getting e-mails about being sued," Manvel reveals. Example: a note from "a person who lives in a multi-family building in Fort Collins. He has a card and he figures it's between him and his insurance company and his mortgage company if he has a home grow. The constitution says he enjoys reasonable access to medical marijuana, so he wants to know how it's legal that we're not letting him grow marijuana in his home just because there's another unit there. So there's a question about the legal defensibility of this."
Manvel is uncertain if the e-mailer's argument is viable: "I'm not a lawyer, so I'll let them fight it out," he says. However, he admits that "I have a problem on the basis of fairness. I have enough money to own a house, so I can grow marijuana in my back window if I have a card. But someone in a duplex cannot grow marijuana in their back window even if their landlord is okay with it."
Still, Manvel wound up voting in favor of the single-family home limitation "because I do think there are hazards in any marijuana grow, although there were some efforts to exaggerate them by various people" at the Tuesday council meeting where the decision was reached. "They made it sound like it was meth or something. But there are hazards of humidity and mold and high electricity use and home invasion, and to impose those on co-residents of a multi-family dwelling is also problematic."
Ben Manvel.
The council plans to monitor the new rules' implementation with an eye toward possible tweaks in the future. But Manvel thinks supporters of the ban are likely to discover that, in this case, the solution to what they saw as a problem may turn out to be more troublesome than the previous scenario.
"I think people supporting the initiative, Initiative 300, were basically saying, 'We can get rid of marijuana in Fort Collins,'" Manvel allows. "Those people who were running the campaign against 300, and those of us on council who supported our existing rules, were trying to make people understand that marijuana is going to be here in Fort Collins because of the state constitutional amendment, and that if we didn't have dispensaries and commercial grows, we were going to have household grows and the caregiver model, where we have absolutely no knowledge of where they are and no way to inspect them. It leaves us in a wild-west state, and we really didn't want to go there -- but that's where we wound up."
Page down to continue reading our interview with Fort Collins councilman Ben Manvel.
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