Four months after a majority of San Diego County voters supported a statewide proposition to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana, the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday passed a ban on cannabis shops and farms in unincorporated areas.

In November, 57 percent of county voters backed Proposition 64, a ballot measure that makes recreational marijuana legal, regulated, and eventually, taxable. It also gave local governments the ability to regulate where cannabis facilities could be located, or ban them entirely.

On Tuesday, supervisors exercised that option and voted 3-2 to stop almost all new medical and recreational marijuana facilities from opening. Three dispensaries that are operating must close by 2022. Two that are in the permitting process may still open up, but must also close in five years.

The new ban is a culmination of a process that began a year ago with an emergency moratorium on new dispensaries and growing operations.


Supervisors Greg Cox and Ron Roberts voted against the ban, while Dianne Jacob, Kristin Gaspar and Bill Horn supported it.

“Voters all the time approve measures that require local elected officials to manage the unintended consequences,” Gaspar said.

One of the consequences of the ban, however, might be a countywide initiative that would overturn the ban but regulate cannabis dispensaries and farms. Cox and dispensary operators alike said that they expect that the cannabis industry to champion some sort of ballot measure.

“This is not going away, as we’ve all seen,” Ren Bowden, the co-owner of San Diego Relief, a dispensary in the pipeline that would have to close in five years under the ban. His plans for a cultivation center was scuttled by the board’s vote.


Bowden said he would not lead the ballot initiative himself, nor could he say what sort of provisions it would include. But he cautioned that it would greatly expand the number of cannabis facilities in the county and said it would be better for the supervisors to regulate the industry.

While there is a new ban, Bowen said there might be a push for new regulations when there is turnover on the Board of Supervisors. Term limits will force Roberts and Horn off the board at the end of 2018, and Cox and Jacob at the end of 2020.

The ban and the five-year sunset on collectives is unfair, said Lincoln Fish, the CEO of Outliers Collective in unincorporated El Cajon.

“We played by the rules, exactly the rules that were put forth. We did everything we can to play by those rules,” he said. “And now you’re changing the game on us.”


The supervisors actions would not impact marijuana regulations or bans in incorporated cities.

Medical marijuana patients, agriculture organizations including the San Diego County Farm Bureau, and others opposed the ban. Community services organizations and groups that work with children spoke against it.

Supervisor Jacob, lead advocate of the ban, said she is concerned that marijuana harms children, and that problems in Colorado where recreational cannabis is legal and sold, could happen here without a ban.

“We only need to look at Colorado to realize that the legalization of marijuana has been a disaster and has not produced the net revenue” that was expected, she said.


Roberts said that a ban runs contrary to the wishes of the majority of voters who have approved medical and recreational marijuana ballot measures.

The county’s planning commission recommended that the board not enact a prohibition, but rather support regulations. Commissioner Bryan Woods said the panel believes that a full ban would encourage a black market with cannabis that could hurt patients, or become a public nuisance.

“An unregulated industry without controls, the black market will put product on the market that could be inferior or tainted,” he said.

Supervisors also voted 4-1 to extend a current moratorium on new medical marijuana facilities. Cox said the extension was intended to prevent confusion between the time when the ban takes effect in 30 days from when it was passed and when an existing moratorium expires Thursday.


A study by political scientist Vince Vasquez, funded by the industry group United Medical Marijuana Coalition, shows that 50.02 percent of voters in the unincorporated parts of San Diego County supported Proposition 64. There was an 82 vote difference. Across the county 57 percent of voters backed the proposition, with the most support, some 65 percent, backing it in Encinitas, where Gaspar had been mayor before being elected supervisor in last fall.