Hitting pause on pot

Boston City Councilor Michael Flaherty is aggrieved that suburban NIMBYites are working to block sales of recreational marijuana in their communities — and, we would point out, they’re using the democratic process to pull it off. Imagine the nerve!

Flaherty and others fear — with some justification, by the way — that Boston and other cities in Massachusetts will become the de facto hub for pot sales in coming years, now that voters have legalized the sale and use of recreational marijuana.

But if so, surely it will be driven as much by the market — the concentration of people in cities (including all those students in Boston) — as it is any decision by suburban communities to keep the pot peddlers out.

It seems highly unlikely that a pot purveyor will “settle” for Allston (or Southie), for example, only after his dream of doing business in, say, leafy Medfield flames out.

The ballot question approved in November gave cities and towns the ability to block pot sales via local referendum. More than 40 have either elected to ban sales entirely or to impose a moratorium while they study next steps.

And yes, there is more than a bit of hypocrisy in all of this, as Flaherty notes. In about a third of those communities, the Herald’s Hillary Chabot reported yesterday, a majority of local voters approved the original ballot initiative. A local ban is the textbook definition of not-in-my-backyard.

But let’s face it, many voters had no clue about the particulars of what they were voting on last November. A community isn’t bound for all eternity by every previous vote. And those communities that vote out (or zone out) pot sales are also giving something up — namely, cash from a local option tax.

The House and Senate will likely take up the issue of local control when they tweak the pot law in coming months, but they shouldn’t water that part down. Just as there are still a handful of “dry” towns in Massachusetts that opt not to sell booze, communities should have the option to go pot-free, too.