2139 Taraval
With 405 pages of multi-signed petitions and 177 letters and e-mails in opposition (“resulting in thousands of signatures”) but 12 pages of multi-signed petitions, 359 letters and e-mails, and 1,508 applicant submitted signatures from local residents and merchants in support, the Planning Commission is expected to approve an application to repurpose the vacant chiropractors’ office at 2139 Taraval into a medical marijuana dispensary.

People are already partaking of products, such as CBD distillate for sale, that are derived from medical marijuana. Most people who are using these items are often engaging for medical reasons, such as treating chronic pain conditions, spinal injuries, alleviating aches and inflammation across the body and so on.

You will find that many people will have different reactions when it comes to being asked, “what is CBD?” Some people think its simply about getting a sense of feeling high, whereas others will think of using it as a medicinal aid and decide to take the substance to help with any number of conditions, including the ones listed above. Unbeknownst to many people, it has been known to be effective and so if this Chiropractors Office is turned into a medical marijuana dispensary, it could help many people. It could provide a place for many people to Get info and the different ailments that can be treated with the help of medical marijuana.

Whilst the public attitude towards such centers selling these products has changed with more and more research making its way into the medical fields, there is still an issue of federal opposition. Even if individual states choose to legalize the product, such as is the case with Colorado, there could still be a conflict between the two governmental bodies. Additionally, there are many people who are still resistant to the idea of allowing the product (and also other consumer products such as bongs that can make it easier to combust and inhale cannabis, Click here to read more about cannabis smoking equipment) to be visibly purchasable in the community due to concerns about the wellbeing of youths in the region, however – this is an issue to dispensaries and headshops challenging the age of any patient that comes through the doors.

The site would be strictly retail (no “smoking, vaporizing, ingesting, or medicating of any kind” allowed on premises). And while the adjacent Chinese Gospel Church apparently has “No Position” with respect to the proposed change, “business hours on Sunday would be limited to 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. to address concerns expressed by the Pastor.”
? Medical Cannabis Dispensary Discretionary Review: 2139 Taraval Street [sf-planning.org]

32 thoughts on “From Services For Chronic Back Pain To…Chronic After Services”
  1. Pot clubs attract scumbags. Sure there are respectable patrons as well but drive by any pot club and see who hangs in front. The Sunset is a family neighborhood and the residents clearly don’t want this business.

  2. I’m not sure that word “clearly” means what you think it means. In any case, scumbag dollars are as green as any others and not all businesses, particularly Taraval retailers, are in the habit of choosing only the best customers.
    The way people react with indignation and loathing to cannabis clubs and users now reminds me of how things used to be for gays back in the day. Could sites like this become focal points for future gentrification?

  3. Marijuana is not “medical” and potheads are not “patients.” It is a transparent sham to circumvent the lack of legalization. Just ask the “patients.”
    They will tell you.
    A few years ago, someone tried to open one of these on Vallejo between Van Ness and Franklin. You can guess what happened in that neighborhood.

  4. On the other hand, if you’re going to allow sales of this commodity at all, Greg is the kind of guy who the community should want to be in charge – he and his family are well-respected, long-term, business folks in the Richmond and he doesn’t stand for any nonsense from staff or customers.

  5. I’m still amazed at some of these archaic atittudes towards marijuana. I tell myself that the “Reefer Madness” crowd has long since died away, but I guess they’re still around. It’s wierd that a safe, legal dispensary is villified despite the numerous private dealers and grow homes in the Sunset, which pose a greater threat and danger to the community because of teh fires that may result from all the substandard and illegal wiring necessary to maintain a grow house.
    What times do the bars open on Taraval? I recall back in the day there were a couple of dives that would be open at 7 AM. Not to mention the creept looking homeless guys who would be at the doors of the 7-11 on Judah at the crack of dawn to buy booze.
    Conifer, you couldn’t be any more wrong. Marijuana is indeed “medicine” for many of teh patients who need it in order to mitigate a variety of illnesses. I don’t deny that some clubs attract a seedy element, but this is a dispensary, not a club (as I understand it).
    The sooner marijuana is legalized the sooner all these “boogeyman” objections to it can be laid to rest.

  6. “What times do the bars open on Taraval? I recall back in the day there were a couple of dives that would be open at 7 AM. Not to mention the creept looking homeless guys who would be at the doors of the 7-11 on Judah at the crack of dawn to buy booze.”
    Exactly. Don’t want a bar, liquor store, or pot store here. Would welcome chiropractor, doctor, or dentist.
    Liquor store, pot dispensary, dentist office – which two belong together?

  7. It has medicinal purposes, whether you approve of recreational use or not.
    Consider that Cancer patients have trouble with their appetite, and this is one remedy. So if you are OK with Alcohol or Tobacco, which can cause cancer, you should not be opposed to this medication. Don’t let your dark age moralizing deny people their medication.

  8. In other news, the neighboring establishment has applied for a rezoning as a twinkie, french fry and other junk food / munchie dispensing establishment. Business is expected to boom.

  9. “[SFPD Officer] Mariles says there has been no spike in thefts or violent crime—or even in DUI arrests—in the areas surrounding the city’s 26 dispensaries: “It’s just the opposite,” he says.”
    from the article linked below.

  10. I have no reason to doubt that “Greg is the kind of guy who…doesn’t stand for any nonsense from staff or customers”, however, there is a lot of experiential information, readily available, that dispensaries are associated with high levels of crime.
    In Berkeley, for example, the notorious Ken Estes, who had been involved in the co-called “medical marijuana” movement since 1992, had been operating “Berkeley Medical Herbs”; after three armed robberies in 10 months and continued violations of even Berkeley’s lax dispensary rules, Estes was asked to leave by the City. From the too-kind article in the sympathetic East Bay Express:

    …that up to thirty percent of his customers buy his product without any medical notes at all. Police and University Avenue merchants, meanwhile, claim that high-school kids used to line up for a taste outside Estes’ club, and that his security guards scared away neighborhood shoppers and even got involved in fights on the street. His fellow cannabis-club operators even tried to drive Estes out of town.

    Ken Estes went on to open at least five other cannabis clubs in Richmond, San Francisco, Clear Lake, South Lake Tahoe and San Mateo, all of which have come under law enforcement scrutiny. It’s a highly-profitable business. It seems to me that if the majority of buyers were legitimate palliative users a la Prop. 215, then it wouldn’t be, because most users would get it from a collective or grow their own at home.

  11. In other news, the neighboring establishment has applied for a rezoning as a twinkie, french fry and other junk food / munchie dispensing establishment. Business is expected to boom.
    ROFL.
    I’m noticing 3 different and distinct arguments here
    1) whether or not THC can be medicinal. The answer is clearly yes
    2) whether or not the majority of people purchasing THC at these dispenseries is actually using it for medicinal purposes. My non-scientific experience with this is that a very high percentage are using it for non-medicinal purposes (but they have prescriptions for “headache” or “back pain” or “insomnia”). There are doctors in SF that will write anybody a prescription as a for-profit venture.
    3) whether or not an establishment will bring more seediness to the nabe. To me this would depend on the execution of the establishment. I’ve been by some Oaksterdam dispenseries in the distant past and found that there was a certain amount of “grit” there… however I’ve also been to pot places in Amsterdam that were decidedly not seedy.
    FWIW: I absolutely hate pot and never ever use it myself. That said, I think it should be legalized due to its low effect on non-users, and I’m tired of paying so many tax dollars to fill our prisons with non violent drug offenders. I also feel that legalizing would reduce the crime from gangs as they’d lose a profit source.

  12. The article linked-to in the previous comment from “R”, seems to contradict a presentation by Commander Michael Regan at the Summit on the Impact of California’s Medical Marijuana Laws in April of 2009.
    During that presentation, he reported that as of Jan 06/Feb07, crimes that occurred at, or in close proximity to San Francisco’s Dispensaries included:
    3 homicides 2 attempted homicides
    6 possession of a loaded firearm
    57 robberies and 27 attempted robberies
    98 aggravated assaults
    144 incidents of battery
    7 incidents of battery on a police officer
    1 forcible rape, 1 attempted rape
    3 sexual batteries
    198 Burglaries and 2 attempted burglaries
    Perhaps the San Francisco Police Department Public Information Officer Boaz Mariles quoted in the Julia Dahl piece knew more or had more recent data, the story doesn’t say.

  13. Brahma, I’m not doubting the crime figures quoted in the PPP. What I question is how many of the crimes can attributed directly to a club/dispensary. All they’re saying is that these crimes occured within the proximity of a club/dispensary.
    If you set up a club in Oakland or the Tenderloin, is it fair to then attribute all the surrounding crime to the club? Doesn’t sound reasonable to me.

  14. “3 homicides 2 attempted homicides
    6 possession of a loaded firearm
    57 robberies and 27 attempted robberies
    98 aggravated assaults
    144 incidents of battery
    7 incidents of battery on a police officer
    1 forcible rape, 1 attempted rape
    3 sexual batteries
    198 Burglaries and 2 attempted burglaries”
    Sounds awful (which I think is the point). But is that any more than would have happened without the pot clubs? Since most of them in the city are in the TL, maybe not.
    P.S. I don’t smoke pot. But I also don’t think it’s bad. Certainly better than alcohol for many people.

  15. R, I think you make a good point that if most of the clubs are in the ‘loin, then there was going to be crime occurring around them.
    I don’t know how many existing clubs are outside of the TL, but this newly-approved place definitely isn’t, so I guess we’ll have a “natural experiment” to gather new data from in a few years.

  16. I don’t even know why anyone is bothering to discuss this. When you move to SF, you essentially give up your rights to freedom from criminal elements, so that a progressive run socialist utopian paradise may be created where the DA ignores whole classes of criminals, when random Muni checks offend illegal immigrants (who are riding the buses without paying) the random checks are immediately halted for 60 days of “sensitivity training”, and the red carpet is rolled out for all types of undesirables. meanwhile, the streets smell, and the schools are left to rot. How can anyone not get this?
    So who really cares what you all think? The unproductive elements want this, and so that’s really all that needs to be known. If this were something controversial, like taking needles out of toddler’s play areas, reducing crime, or actually helping chronically unemployed people develop marketable job skills, I could understand the arguing, but something like this? No way is anyone going to vote it down.
    Unless the Chinese vote-getting machine decides they don’t like it, at which point chief of police will personally pour gasoline on the building and ignite it in broad daylight.

  17. Unproductive elements? Much as the Greatful Dead made more money than any other band in part by allowing their music to be traded freely, appearances are deceiving. The greatest explosion of value ever created came from cannabis users. You might want to start with What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff. It is no coincidence that electronic commerce began with cannabis sales.
    In contrast straight, sober, uptight, suit-wearing parents consumed with the welfare of children were consistently at the center of the recent debacle that inflated housing values beyond all reason.

  18. Appearances are deceiving, indeed.
    The amounts made by people running, owning, or employed by pot clubs are probably (very few, if any, studies not funded by the NORML crowd have been done and published in peer-reviewed journals, so we don’t know) are/going to be swamped by the amounts consumed by teenagers sitting around in their parents’ basements getting stoned, adults who don’t have jobs paying enough to support hedonistic pot use committing crimes in order to fund acquisition of pot, etc.
    Do you really need a laundry list to clarify what’s being referred to by “unproductive elements”?

  19. i like the way ex-SFer framed it but disagree a little with conclusions…..
    I’m noticing 3 different and distinct arguments here
    1) whether or not THC can be medicinal.
    The jury is still out on this one as there have been no large scale controlled clinical trials to test MJ vs. PBO. All of the medical evidence to date is anecdotal and therefore not scientifically sound. i believe there are probably some anti pain and nausea benefits, but the jury is out until this is proven by going through the same rigorous hurdles as other drugs on the market.
    2) whether or not the majority of people purchasing THC at these dispenseries is actually using it for medicinal purposes.
    this is clearly a resounding no. this needs to be more tightly regulated so that the profit motive is removed. i’m all for compassionate care use for dying cancer or AIDs pts, but there are plenty of treatmetns for your average depression, backache, etcs that have gone through rigorous medical testing and the efficacy and side effect profiles are clearly known. almost everyone of my potsmoking friends have a medical marijuana card and they have no ailments to speak of.
    3) whether or not an establishment will bring more seediness to the nabe.
    yes, until prescriptions are more tightly regulated these establishments will bring more seediness to the neighborhoods (no matter how tough the owner is).
    I’m all for making pot legal as a recreational drug so tht we can get the tax dollars and get rid of some of the criminal element. but putting “medical” label on these clinics is disingenuous. if we want it to be medical, it needs to go through testing and only be dispensed by licensed physicains and pharmacists and only for it’s future approve label (compassionate care)

  20. “…committing crimes in order to fund acquisition of pot…”
    While it is commonplace for people to resort to crime to support their habits of consuming highly addictive drugs like meth and heroin, I’ve never once heard of someone resorting to crime for pot. I’m sure it happens, but is probably less common than resorting to crime to support a Jägermeister habit.

  21. Yeah, it’s not that expensive. Just expensive enough, that keeping it illegal provides a source of revenue to gangs and drug cartels.

  22. J wrote:

    Don’t let your dark age moralizing deny people their medication.

    I’m still amazed at some of these holdover from the 60’s counterculture “if it feels good, do it!” attitudes towards marijuana. I tell myself that the “Jeff Spicoli”-type crowd has long since died away, but I guess they’re still around and as Cheech and Chong urge them, “Still Smokin'”. It’s weird that a federally-categorized Schedule 1 drug, which the EPA recently declared a carcinogen, can be dispensed freely from a retail-level establishment, next door to a church, no less, and be approved by The City Planning Commission.
    How many teenagers are S.F. potheads willing to sacrifice in order to legalize and legitimize their own recreational marijuana use? From SFGate’s blogger, and Internist published on the topic, RJ Gurley:

    Recent, high-quality, long-term, robust research involving thousands upon thousands of people over generations of time, in several populations and countries, has shown that marijuana, especially in teen boys, leads to a measurable increase in the future development of schizophrenia — even when controlling for family and environment. These findings, very similar to unrelated alcohol research, show that risks are both dose-related, and are higher the lower the age at first exposure — all findings consistent with what we know, neurophysiologically, about the developing brain. Schizophrenia and marijuana is an issue that has gotten surprisingly little press in this country.

    The sooner we vote on the Nov. ballot measure or AB 390 is vetoed by the Governor, all these spurious justifications for so-called “medicinal” use can be laid to rest and recreational pot enthusiasts can go back to using just like they do now: because they enjoy getting stoned.

  23. Smoking is not the only way that people take marijuana.
    Teenagers are not lost to marijuana. They are lost to absentee parents.
    The war on drugs has accomplished nothing but crowded prisons.

  24. The nopa neighborhood is actively fighting a new pot club on Divisadero and Fell.
    For all of you who are pro-pot club, have you ever had one near your home?
    1) Divisadero and Grove: Massive escalation of gun violence to the point where the police have a patrol sitting at the corner 24/7. (Things are more under control now..)
    2) 22nd and Guerrero: I manage a property near there and every time I would come to park there would be 1 or more cars with the windows clouded with smoke. The people in the cars certainly did not look like they were suffering from cancer or any other debilitating disease. (Club gone now.)
    And yes, I did buy pot for my mom when she was dying from cancer. For the 1 month that she was ingesting pot, she used about 4-5 buds total – not very much at all, and she liked it.
    If people are serious about pot for medical use, it should be controlled like any other medication.
    If people want to legalize it for recreation, I will certainly fight it, just like I want to have cigarettes banned. When someone drinks, you don’t get drunk by sitting next to them. (No problem for me if people want to eat it).

  25. For you potheads in South Beach / Yerba Buena, while walking the dog this weekend saw a notice posted on Howard between 1st & 2nd for a coming cannibas dispensary. While I personally would like to go all NIMBY on it, I’m sure the neighborhood will not mount much opposition. Not that opposition means anything for a pot club.
    Maybe a drive through for the commute home across the bridge?

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