| Photo: StoptheDrugWar.org |
| HopeNet smells like a marijuana dispensary. And its bathroom once stopped working for one day in 2008. Yeah, that’s the kind of “complaints” that S.F.’s dispensaries get. |
So much for all those police-generated myths about medical marijuana dispensaries spoiling the neighborhood.
Despite Nervous Nellies, most dispensaries are quiet, respectable, and hell, as close to boring as you can come when your shelves are full of weed.
That truth has been highlighted again as an SF Weekly investigation revealed a grand total of only 11 complaints on file from a five-year period, according to documents received from the paper’s public records request, reports Chris Roberts.
The Weekly asked the Department of Public Health, which oversees San Francisco’s dispensary program, for a summary of recent problems with the city’s pot collectives. And of the 11 complaints on record, most of them are distinctly of the trifling variety.
For example, in 2006, an upstairs neighbor of HopeNet on Ninth Street wrote to say that the stench from the dispensary was exacerbating his emphysema. A DPH inspector visited and smelled pot, but couldn’t reach the complainant after a few tries. Result: resolved.
In another complaint from 2007, Canna Med Care on Sutter Street — since closed — was reportedly using a scale that was off four-tenths of a gram. Not exactly crisis-level stuff.
Oh, and in 2008, the bathroom at HopeNet reportedly wasn’t working. But it was by the time DPH arrived. You get the idea.
“Suffice it to say that San Francisco medical cannabis dispensaries are hardly the most threatening entities in town,” the Weekly offers.
“How many other businesses have had that few complaints against them?” asked David Goldman with the S.F. chapter of Americans for Safe Access. “How many bars, how many drug stores — how many banks? I’d say the medical cannabis industry is amazingly complaint-free compared to other industries.”