Sacramento cannabis users finally get a space to smoke, thanks to common sense | Opinion
Everyone needs something to look forward to.
For workers after a long day, or parents after a day taking care of their children, a glass of wine or a pint of beer is the stamp of approval of an honest day’s work. It brings them a little joy in their life.
Cannabis users have been deprived of that privilege. Due to Sacramento’s ban on smoking on public property and restrictions in rental apartments, people who smoke cannot partake in cannabis. That is an issue because nearly 50% of Sacramentans are renters. Some cannabis smokers are parents and don’t want to expose their children to secondhand smoke.
But on Tuesday, the city council passed an ordinance by a 5-4 vote to start a pilot program for cannabis lounges in the city where consenting adults can purchase and smoke cannabis at designated lounges much like cigar smokers do at cigar bars and like consumers of alcohol do at wine bars, taverns, saloons and microbreweries.
“If we believe that cannabis should be legal, then everyone should have a legal place to use it,” Council member and creator of the ordinance, Katie Valenzuela, said at Tuesday’s council meeting.
To believe that notion is pretty simple, yet the road to get to this point was quite challenging as polar opposite views collided.
A sensible decision
The case for and against the pilot program was very passionate. Council member Eric Guerra staunchly opposed the idea of cannabis lounges while Caity Maple and Valenzuela were clear proponents of the program. The vote came down to Mayor Darrell Steinberg.
Steinberg, with no allegiances to either side, summed up why this issue was such a stalemate.
“This is one of the rare instances where my heart and head are not together,” Steinberg said. “Every public policy decision we make ought to further restrict smoke.”
Despite this concern, Steinberg’s decisive yes vote turned on the fact that homeowners can legally smoke cannabis and renters cannot because of lease agreements that forbid smoking in their units. That alone makes this an equity issue.
For a city that allows the cultivation, distribution and sale of cannabis, Steinberg did the right balancing of priorities by letting this pilot project go forward.
There has been much fear-mongering about this pilot program, specifically about the city being engulfed in a haze of weed smoke due to the lounges. There are 40 cannabis dispensaries in the city limits, but some of them don’t have the capabilities to support a lounge. Weed smoke isn’t going to envelop Sacramento like tule fog. Anti-secondhand smoke advocates can sleep calmly.
Cannabis smokers
Californians voted to decriminalize cannabis in our state constitution with Proposition 64 in 2016, thus giving smokers of the plant the freedom to smoke in this state. Whether voters decided to pass Prop 64 to undo decades of racial profiling from the war on drugs or to help the cannabis industry, weed smokers were given the ability to legally consume marijuana and everyone in the state should honor that.
City council’s vote proves that Sacramento has finally gotten to point with cannabis where it’s no longer seen as a drug or political pawn but as a freedom that people can enjoy freely.
Let’s smoke to that.
