Years of struggling to shut down illegal pot shops has prompted San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith to shift gears and begin criminally prosecuting shop operators and their landlords.

Goldsmith has previously resisted a criminal approach, contending the civil injunctions his office has used for many years are the fastest and most effective legal method.

But Goldsmith announced last week that the city will start utilizing both civil and criminal means in the face of increasing outcry over the illegal shops from residents and the owners of 14 legal dispensaries approved under a 2014 city ordinance.

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Residents say the illegal shops are dangerous because they don’t conform to city zoning rules designed to ensure businesses selling marijuana are far away from housing, schools, parks, churches and other sensitive uses.

Owners of the legal dispensaries, eight of which have opened, say the roughly three dozen illegal shops are unfair competition because owners of the legal dispensaries had to pay roughly $500,000 each for permits, land-use consultants and lawyers.

San Diego previously filed criminal charges in pot shop cases only if illegal dispensaries refused to shut down even after a judge issued a civil injunction ordering them to do so.

Under the new approach, the city will file both criminal and civil charges at the beginning of the process to provide two potential routes to success and add the threat of jail time into the mix earlier.


Goldsmith said the more aggressive approach will only be used when the operator or landlord has previously been involved with an illegal shop, but added that’s the case with most of the remaining illegal dispensaries.

“We are left generally today with what I call the hard-core offenders,” Goldsmith told the City Council’s Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee last week. “These are not nice people. None of us want the illegal dispensaries in our neighborhoods.”

Scott Chipman, leader of the anti-marijuana group San Diegans for Safe Neighborhoods, had a more mixed reaction.

“We are hopeful the threat of a criminal prosecution will actually deter people from opening as well as encourage the bad operators to close right away,” Chipman said. “We think it’s an acknowledgment that what’s been happening over the last three or four years has not been truly effective.”


But Chipman added that dispensaries are so profitable that owners will just seek new ways to evade the city’s efforts, as they’ve done for years.

When the city shuts down an illegal shop, another one often opens nearby with most of the same people still in charge. Operators have also been known to recruit homeless people to sign their leases in order to complicate shutdown efforts.

And landlords, who also benefit financially because they can charge high rent to a profitable business, often team up with operators to stymie the city.

“I’m not very optimistic about this,” Chipman said.


Goldsmith agreed that he’s fighting an uphill battle.

Shutting down dispensaries is harder than some other illegal businesses because the city uses zoning laws instead of criminal laws, so they can’t simply raid them and shut them down.

That’s because state voters made medical marijuana legal in 1996 and the federal government ceased enforcing its laws against the drug four years ago.

State allows, however, allows cities to restrict where medical marijuana can be sold. And cities can classify a zoning violation as a criminal misdemeanor, which Vista and some other cities have done successfully in recent years.


Goldsmith said the criminal approach is more difficult because the city faces the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of proof, which is higher than what’s required in civil cases.

In addition, the criminal route allows for jury trials instead of rulings by a judge, and defendants in criminal cases are entitled to review evidence through “discovery,” which can make the process more lengthy.

“Our strategy of filing civil lawsuits is still the fastest way to shut down illegal dispensaries,” he said.

In addition, the maximum amount of potential jail time is only 180 days, and Goldsmith said judges typically choose probation instead.


He said, however, that he plans to press for at least some jail time as hard as possible in these misdemeanor cases because the illegal conduct goes beyond zoning violations like adding an illegal addition onto a house.

Southeastern San Diego resident James Harrison, who has become perhaps the city’s most vocal critic of illegal pot shops, said he’s pleased with the more aggressive approach. But added that city officials need to be doing everything possible to shut down the shops, three of which operator in close proximity to the Little Lamb Land Christian Preschool in Mount Hope that Harrison operates.

“We’re the ones who have to deal with these what you call ‘hard-core’ offenders,” Harrison told Goldsmith last week. “We don’t want to just keep hearing from you ‘we’re working on it.’ Not to be disrespectful or dishonoring to you because I really respect your position, but I wonder sometimes if you really get what we’re dealing with.”

Goldsmith agreed to provide the public safety committee a six-month update and how much success the new approach has.