CAMBRIDGE FIGHTS POT RULING, BIZSMART,
Cambridge appealing ruling after pot shop wins fight over 2-year ban
Less than a month after Cambridge’s attempt to ban a medical marijuana dispensary from selling to all adults for two years was ruled unconstitutional in superior court, the city announced that it has filed an emergency motion to halt the ruling — a decision ripped by the local pot shop.
“The City’s actions in pursuing an appeal reflect a contempt for the Court and the rule of law,” Revolutionary Clinics, one of the shops hit by Cambridge’s moratorium, said in a statement. “Rather than working toward solutions and sound policy that can have a tangible impact, the City continues to play politics.”
The announcement comes after a Middlesex Superior Court judge ruled on Jan. 24 that the moratorium on Revolutionary Clinics opening a retail pot shop violated the Home Rule Amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution and state cannabis law.
Superior Court Associate Justice Kathleen M. McCarthy stated that lifting the ban “promotes the public interest” by “invalidating conflicting local ordinances.”
Last fall, the Cambridge City Council approved the two-year moratorium during which only “economic empowerment candidates” as designated by the Cannabis Control Commission could operate retail pot shops in the city. The empowerment program was designed to help businesses in communities disproportionately and negatively affected by the prior criminalization of weed.
Revolutionary Clinics filed a lawsuit, by Boston law firm Saul, Ewing, Arnstein and Lehr, in Middlesex Superior Court this past fall seeking to prevent the city from enforcing the ordinance, which it calls “unlawful” because “it authorizes Cambridge and its city officials to determine who may operate cannabis businesses in Cambridge.”
When the court’s ruling was made last month, Revolutionary Clinics praised it and said it would allow their company, and others, “to move quickly” to open adult-use pot shops in the city.
“The decision determined that the injunction in favor of Revolutionary Clinics ‘promotes the public interest’ and validates its significant investments in protecting patient access to safe, regulated, high-quality products in Cambridge,” a company statement said.
Revolutionary Clinics claimed in October that it would cost the company $700,000 a month in lost profits by not being allowed to sell recreational weed in the city. The company has medical pot shops in Cambridge and Somerville and plans to open another store in Cambridge this year.
The lawsuit also claimed that, “Not only does Cambridge’s adoption of the Two-Year Moratorium offend the will of Cambridge Voters” — about 71% of whom voted in favor of legalizing weed — “it was brazenly enacted in the face of warnings by the drafters of the cannabis laws that it would be illegal.”