Mayor John Tory says the city may have to step in to curb the number of medical marijuana dispensaries springing up ahead of the federal government’s move toward legalization.

Tory said he would be meeting with Liberal MP and former Toronto police chief Bill Blair to discuss what can be done in the interim, after taking a field trip over the weekend to see dispensaries in Kensington Market.

“The notion that these can spread like wildfire across the city and that they can be done in a completely unregulated manner . . . is just not the right way to go about this,” Tory told reporters. “If there are others who are not going to take action, then we might have to in order to bring some semblance of control to it.”

The city is not officially tracking the number of dispensaries. Independent website TO Dispensaries has mapped nearly 90 shops open within the city’s borders, including at least nine in Kensington alone.

Tory said he visited the market because he had read there was a concentration of “supposed” medical marijuana dispensaries there and wanted to see the situation for himself.

“I went into one of them and started asking a lot of questions and the one I went into, they of course said that they were following all the rules and it was everybody else that wasn’t. And that’s fine. I mean, they helped to educate me a little bit,” he said. “They were a bit surprised that I came wandering into their store, as were the people on the sidewalk when I came out.”

The Star earlier reported that the city’s licensing division was gearing up for a crackdown on dispensaries operating in a legal limbo in areas not zoned as industrial.

Clinton Simmonds, manager for Kind Supply dispensary, said he was surprised when the mayor arrived, but said Tory’s interest in the issue was refreshing.

“Not every day that you have the mayor walking in,” he said, adding it offered an opportunity to explain how his shop differentiates itself from other dispensaries with a strict policy to serve only the medical community and customers with an existing prescription.

Tory said he would be meeting with Blair, now the MP in charge of the federal pot file, to discuss whether Ottawa plans to help cities prepare for the decriminalization and regulation of marijuana use.

“If not, then we’ll have to look at what we might do, and I’m quite prepared to do that,” Tory said, adding there is already a precedent in Vancouver, where city councillors voted in June last year to license dispensaries.

Vancouver regulations preventt dispensaries from locating within 300 metres of schools, community centres or other dispensaries, thereby curbing concentration in any one neighbourhood. Licences cost $30,000.

Simmonds said the store was designed based on the Vancouver regulations and that he would welcome licensing ahead of changes to federal laws.

“I think for the short term it would help, because it’s then holding the owners of these dispensaries accountable for who they’re selling (to),” he said. “A lot more shops have popped up and many of them are operating with the idea that it’s already a recreational market.”

Councillor Joe Cressy, who chairs the city’s drug strategy implementation panel and whose downtown ward includes Kensington, agrees the federal government needs to weigh in soon.

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“What we need is interim and immediate guidance from the federal government as to how we are to deal with cannabis today, because today cannabis remains outside of the law,” Cressy told reporters.

“The fact that we are moving, in this country, towards a legalized, regulatory approach for cannabis is a good thing. The criminalization approach of cannabis over a century has not worked. You cannot arrest your way out of this issue.”

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