Some in Nipomo say dispensaries are a no-no

Update: The would-be owner of a proposed medical marijuana clinic in Nipomo said Wednesday he will go forward with his plans despite the near unanimous opposition he faced at a community meeting Monday night.

“It’s only a recommendation,” Robert Brody of Los Angeles said in this story from the San Luis Obispo Tribune. “We can go forward” with the proposal to the county Planning and Building Department.

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Nipomo residents are organizing to fend off an attempt to open a medical marijuana dispensary a few blocks from the community’s swap meet, the Tribune of San Luis Obispo reports here.

Robert Brody of Los Angeles is proposing the business in a 4,000-square-foot vacant warehouse and office building, writes The Tribune’s Bob Cuddy. He pitched his project Monday to a county land use subcommittee, and it’s scheduled to go before the South County Advisory Commission next week.

The dispensary proposal could end up at the county Planning Commission and eventually at the Board of Supervisors.

Home to some 14,000 people, Nipomo sits between Pismo Beach and Santa Maria in southern San Luis Obispo county. Brody told The Tribune he believes there are many people in the community who need the relief that medical marijuana can bring — people undergoing chemotherapy or suffering from glaucoma, for example.

“There are many people who can use it,” Brody said.

He added that the product is not always sold in a form that requires smoking — it can be turned into food, which helps older folks who do not want to inhale smoke. And the alternative — a drug known as Marinol that contains the same ingredients — costs $30 a pill, he said.

Brody called the notion that medical marijuana dispensaries attract gangs “old wives’ tales.”

He said he is a retired businessman and this is his only would-be dispensary.

However, Guy Murray, a Nipomo attorney, said he and 30 to 40 other Nipomo residents opposed the dispensary when it went before the subcommittee. He said the community is the wrong place for it.

Murray said he was not arguing the medical merits for or against marijuana as a treatment. However, he noted that there is a conflict between state and federal laws on the narcotic’s legality.