A DISPENSARY ROBBERY? ACT NOW, CHULA VISTA

On Monday night, multiple people robbed an unlicensed cannabis dispensary in Chula Vista, leaving an employee and a man inside the shop injured, one with a gunshot wound, the other with a head wound. Who deserves some blame for the ugly incident? City Hall. If Chula Vista city leaders had emulated what San Diego did to essentially eliminate illegal storefront cannabis sales, the unlicensed dispensary would have been shut down years ago.

The key to the strategy introduced by then-city Attorney Jan Goldsmith was to use civil and criminal sanctions against landlords who rented space to the dispensaries, not just target shop owners and employers. Once the word got out in San Diego that landlords would pay a heavy price if they rented space to illegal cannabis shops, such stores gradually disappeared. State officials embraced this approach last month, abandoning the whack-a-mole tactics seen in Chula Vista and many other cities in which lucrative stores that are forced to close would quickly re-emerge at another location nearby.

In April, Chula Vista City Attorney Glen Googins said landlords would be targeted as part of enforcement efforts. Monday’s violent robbery wouldn’t have happened if those efforts had followed the San Diego textbook. A new report by the state’s Cannabis Advisory Committee found that two years into its legalization of recreational marijuana, “as much as 80% of the cannabis market in California remains illicit.” The state expects to see $3.1 billion in licensed cannabis sales but $8.7 billion in unlicensed sales in 2019. Time for that crackdown, Chula Vista.