It took one day for West Shore RCMP to shut down a newly-opened Langford marijuana dispensary, with the municipality’s mayor saying illegal pot shops will not be tolerated.
The Green Tree marijuana dispensary opened Monday on Granderson Road, steps from West Shore RCMP headquarters and blocks from David Cameron Elementary and Savory Elementary schools.
West Shore RCMP said officers conducted a compliance check on Tuesday and observed “evidence of possible offences under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.”
Marijuana was seized but the detachment did not say how much.
West Shore RCMP said it’s illegal for medicinal marijuana dispensaries or compassion clubs to sell marijuana to the public, regardless of whether customers have medical licences to possess marijuana or the vendor has a licence to produce.
“Businesses and/or individuals operating in contravention of the CDSA and Health Canada regulations may be subject to investigation and criminal charges in accordance with Canadian laws,” said West Shore RCMP spokesman Const. Alex Bérubé.
No criminal charges were announced and the RCMP said it is continuing to investigate
Langford Mayor Stew Young did not mince words when saying marijuana dispensaries will not be allowed in the community. “We are not going to allow a pot store in Langford until it’s regulated and licensed.”
He said he has received requests from more than a dozen pot shops looking to set up in Langford.
Green Tree had been warned it would be shut down, Young said. “It’s pretty simple, it’s illegal and it’s in contravention of our bylaws,” he said.
“They’re operating without a business licence and they’re right by a park and by a kids’ play area. They will be shut down like any other business,” Young said Tuesday, just before Mounties carried out the raid.
The glass shelves were empty and the doors were locked on Tuesday as a prospective customer approached the business.
Tyler Housone was frustrated at news of the shut down.
“I definitely think the community needs this,” said Housone, who supports marijuana legalization. “This way I don’t have to go downtown [Victoria] or into to Sooke to go to my dispensaries.”
Green Tree bills itself on its website as a “medical dispensary” based in Nanaimo with sister stores in Duncan and North Vancouver. Two Ottawa Green Tree locations were shut down by police in November but reopened within weeks.
No one from the company returned calls for comment on Tuesday.
Three Nanaimo marijuana dispensaries operated by different companies were raided and closed by RCMP in December 2015, only to reopen the next day. Mounties in Campbell River closed two pot shops in April 2016.
Young criticized the federal government for facilitating the production of medical marijuana without having an efficient plan to distribute it.
“Health Canada gives a stringent bunch of rules to the licensed [medical marijuana] producers and yet there’s no regulations for the dispensaries which is absolutely stupid,” Young said.
There are 38 Health Canada-approved medical marijuana producers across Canada which distribute the product by mail.
A look across Greater Victoria municipalities reveals a hodgepodge of approaches to marijuana dispensaries. Esquimalt does not give business licences to marijuana shops, while neighbouring Victoria has adopted bylaws to regulate the 35 marijuana-related businesses. There are three dispensaries in Sooke.
Young said medical marijuana should be distributed by pharmacies, which already have safeguards to distribute other drugs.
He said the federal government has to give local communities the tools to regulate and manage marijuana distribution.
“It’s not a healthy situation when communities have 30 or 40 of these things pop up and we don’t know where the drugs are coming from, we don’t know what other things [the dispensaries] are doing. There’s no safeguards,” Young said.
A federal task force on marijuana legalization released a report in December which recommends allowing storefront and mail-order sales to people 18 and older, with personal growing limits of four plants per person and a 30-gram limit on personal possession. The task force also recommended that the government support development of a roadside drug screening device to detect drug-impaired drivers and implement a national education strategy to warn against drug-impaired driving.
