* Naperville…
Council members were offered the options to begin the process of amending zoning code to allow retail sale of adult-use cannabis, prepare documentation for the city to opt out of the sale, or administer a community engagement survey to get resident input.
The council members chose to start the opt-out process…
Stores selling recreational marijuana will not be permitted to open in Naperville, city council members decided in a split vote, saying they want to protect their family-friendly brand and await data on how adult use affects communities.
“We have a great community here and we need to keep the protection of it paramount,” council member Kevin Coyne said.
The move makes Naperville among the first suburban communities to ban sales of the drug, which will be legal for adult possession and private use across the state beginning Jan. 1 under the Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act.
Council member Patty Gustin on Tuesday sent an email to contacts encouraging them to speak out and said she fears the costs of increased addiction as well as the potential for “big marijuana” to profit from legal sales.
Prohibiting sales, she said, will safeguard Naperville’s families, and losing potential tax revenue won’t hurt the city’s bottom line.
“The true cost is not opting out and sitting on our hands until this is forced upon us,” she said during more than two hours of debate on the topic Tuesday night. “There’s no dollar amount worth selling out our kids.”
Um, your kids are gonna buy it from dealers who don’t check ID cards. The more towns that allow sales, the more pressure is put on the illegal and often violent criminal networks which grow, transport and deliver the product.
* The argument that a couple of dispensaries will kill “the brand” is ridic…
“There is nothing family friendly about recreational marijuana. Family friendly is Naperville’s brand,” resident Jennifer Taylor said.
Councilwoman Brodhead countered that position, saying a handful of marijuana businesses would be unlikely to have any effect on people’s perception of the city.
“I don’t see there is going to be any loss of brand by allowing a limited number of recreational marijuana dispensaries in Naperville,” Brodhead said. “I think we are afraid of something that will not happen.”
The city looks at alcohol in a very serious way, particularly in times when it had to deal with such negatives as bar fights and DUI accidents, but there’s still a lot of alcohol sold in Naperville, she said.
I thought I was finished dealing with the misinformation on this topic when the GA passed the bill. Apparently not. Ignorance and panic abound.
…Adding… A golden nugget from comments…
So, let me see if I’ve got this right. Naperville won’t partake of the tax dollars of legal marijuana, but it will be legal there, so residents will spend their money elsewhere. Good plan.
* On to Springfield…
Springfield Mayor Jim Langfelder said with a medical dispensary already operating in the city, he expects city alderman to find the best place to allow recreational sales.
“What’s that right number of dispensary areas and that’s what we’ll have to determine,” Langfelder said. “We’ll at least have one for the first year. After that, that’s where we’ll really fine-tune things and see how it’s working.”
Existing medical dispensaries can apply for licenses to sell recreational cannabis. The state will then roll out more licenses for additional growing and selling licenses to other applicants.
Langfelder said city leaders will likely be cautious.
“We don’t want the proliferation like video gaming, everywhere,” Langfelder said. “And that’s really the concern. I was at the Levitt [AMP] Concert Series [an outdoor concert in downtown Springfield] and I could smell it in the air so I think people are already testing it out.”
Yeah. People are just now starting to smoke weed. Right.
* Springfield-area politicos have been saying the same thing since at least 1938…
Sangamon County resisted “reefer madness,” but marijuana finally arrived in Springfield in 1938.
“Brilliant raids” by two Springfield police detectives resulted in the arrests of three men — two locals and one from Youngstown, Ohio — on Aug. 6, 1938, the Illinois State Journal reported the next day. The officers seized “enough marijuana to manufacture more than a thousand of the cigarets that are proving a plague to some of the youth of the nation,” the newspaper said.
The bust seems to have been the first ever in Sangamon County. In fact, county juvenile probation officer Gwendolen Sherman told the Journal in December 1937 she had seen no evidence of marijuana being used locally.
“If there is any marijuana in Springfield, it’s certainly well hidden,” Sherman said.
* That SJ-R lede was totally wrong as well. From the Sangamon County Historical Society…
Marijuana had been a component of some prescription and patent medicines before passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which regulated and taxed marijuana and other forms of Cannabis sativa. The law drove use of psychoactive marijuana underground; it also basically destroyed the production of industrial hemp (which does not have intoxicating properties) in the U.S.
The new costs and red tape led Springfield pharmacists to stop using marijuana in medicines they compounded almost immediately, the Journal reported in November 1937.
* A bit more history…
In the early 1900s an influx of Mexican immigrants came to the US fleeing political unrest in their home country. With them, they brought the practice of smoking cannabis recreationally. And it took off. The Spanish word for the plant started to be used more often too. Marijuana. Or as it was spelled at that time, marihuana, with an “H. This is when the more sensational headlines about the drug began to appear.
In 1936, a propaganda film called Reefer Madness was released. In the movie, teenagers smoke weed for the first time and this leads to a series of horrific events involving hallucination, attempted rape, and murder. Much of the media portrayed it as a gateway drug. […]
Harry Anslinger took the scientifically unsupported idea of marijuana as a violence-inducing drug, connected it to black and Hispanic people, and created a perfect package of terror to sell to the American media and public. By emphasizing the Spanish word marihuana instead of cannabis, he created a strong association between the drug and the newly arrived Mexican immigrants who helped popularize it in the States. He also created a narrative around the idea that cannabis made black people forget their place in society. He pushed the idea that jazz was evil music created by people under the influence of marijuana. […]
In the first full year after the Marihuana Tax Act was passed, black people were about three times more likely to be arrested for violating narcotic drug laws than whites. And Mexicans were nearly nine times more likely to be arrested for the same charge.
* Photo of the folks arrested in that 1938 Springfield bust…
Surprise, surprise.
* Related…
* Naperville gas station worker suspended after telling Latino customers ‘ICE will come’
* Naperville leader calls for Stava-Murray’s resignation over ‘white supremacist policies’ comments
