L.A. City Attorney Sues 2 Local Pot Shops

Lawyers in the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office filed lawsuits today to force seven marijuana dispensaries to close.

The city's latest medical marijuana ordinance relegates the outlets to primarily industrial areas, and City Attorney Carmen Trutanich said that the operators being sued have shops in areas that are not zoned for pot outlets.

The lawsuit also seeks to have the landlords evict their lease-holders.

"With these lawsuits, the city of Los Angeles is sending a clear message that we will no longer allow property owners to turn a blind eye to illegal activity,'' Trutanich said.

Cancare Collective manager Marco Barrios said he had just been served with the lawsuit.

"We're going to take action with our attorney,'' he said. "We feel like we need to protect ourselves and our patients. We're very serious about staying open for our patients.''

Barrios said Cancare Collective, which has been open in North Hollywood for about five months, has the necessary license to operate.

Patch recently investigated communites of North Hollywood, Studio City, Toluca Lake Valley Village and the Universal City area and found at least 48, 15 of which the city did not even know about.

Managing Assistant City Attorney Asha Greenberg said often pot collectives think their business tax registration certificates give them a right to distribute marijuana. They are a way for businesses to enter the city's tax collection system.

The city is preparing to hold a lottery for dispensaries that can prove they have been operating continuously since before Sept. 14, 2007, when the city imposed a moratorium on new pot dispensaries. It wants to reduce the number of shops in Los Angeles to 100, around the number that were open when the moratorium was passed.

Cancare is on the list of 201 pot shops which were sent letters in March and ordered to close because they had not registered for the lottery. 

The Spot in the Cahuenga Pass near Universal City is also one of the seven shops named in the suit. It is also on the list of shops which did not apply for the lottery and have been ordered to close.

Many of the 201 shops ordered to close are also located in business districts, and why these particular seven were filed suit against is not clear.

The other dispensaries named in the lawsuit include the Golden Triangle Collective, Cahuenga's the Spot, Natural Ways Always, Westside Green Oasis, BB Collective and Helping Hint.

The suit seeks $25,000 in fines from each defendant for alleged violations of the state Narcotics Abatement Law.

A spokesman for Trutanich said the owners of the medical marijuana businesses and their landlords could be fined up to $2,500 each day that a dispensary is found to be out of compliance with the city ordinance.

Medical marijuana advocates have accused municipal governments of getting in the way of the 1996 state law under which people with a doctor's recommendation can legal possess, grow and exchange pot via nonprofit collectives.

Law enforcement authorities, however, say that the operators of many of the hundreds of medical marijuana outlets around the city do not follow the state law.

The City News Service contributed to this report.