[[{“value”:”Nearly ten years after Florida voters legalized medical marijuana, the first medical marijuana dispensary has officially opened within Miami city limits.
The City of Miami has been an island of prohibition
Ayr Wellness opened its dispensary in Midtown at 3160 N. Miami Ave. on Friday, January 10, after years of the city dragging its feet in permitting the opening of medical marijuana dispensaries.
“It’s pretty exciting. This has been a five-plus-year process since we started planning this particular dispensary,” Rob Vanisko, vice president of public engagement for Ayr Wellness, tells New Times. “From lease signing to all the approvals to the appeals to actually be able to get this open has been quite the process.”
Following the passage of the 2016 constitutional amendment legalizing medical marijuana, then-city attorney Victoria Mendez claimed that the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA), which classified cannabis as an illegal drug, superseded the state law — preventing the city from issuing a permit for a dispensary. In the meantime, the city watched other municipalities allow dispensaries within its boundaries with specific zoning regulations.
In 2021, real estate investor and Los Angeles entrepreneur Romie Chaudhari sued the city for blocking his two entities — MRC44, LLC, and 60 NE 11th, LLC — from opening a dispensary near nightclubs Space and E11even in the Park West neighborhood.
Two years prior, the city zoning director denied Chaudhari’s application for a certificate of use on the advice from the city attorney’s office.
Even after a federal judge and the city’s planning and zoning appeals board sided with Chaudhari, the zoning director appealed the board’s decision. Aside from the legal hurdles, city commissioners were not exactly welcoming to medical marijuana dispensaries.
Commissioner Manolo Reyes claimed children would be able to access marijuana gummies, while Commissioner Joe Carollo, who called the appeal the “Cheech and Chong ordinance,” said people would get behind the wheel high on cannabis should a dispensary open.
Despite Carollo’s and Reyes’ hatred for marijuana, in May 2022, the Miami City Commission finally struck down the appeal, permitting Chaudhari to obtain a certificate of use to open a dispensary. This paved the way for other companies to apply for permits within the city.
The medical marijuana question was back on the dais last February when the city voted to approve a certificate of use issued to Ayr Wellness at its proposed Midtown location.
Once again, Carollo and Reyes expressed their concerns regarding marijuana dispensaries.
Reyes asserted that children would start smoking marijuana in school and that people could easily get fraudulent medical marijuana cards.
“What I don’t want to open is the door,” Reyes said at the commission meeting in February 2024.
Carollo claimed that kids in Hispanic and Black communities would suffer due to medical marijuana. He argued that the city would turn into a “free-for-all.”
“I remember when I was a young man, we would see the movies and laugh at Cheech and Chong,” Carollo added. “Welcome to the world of Cheech and Chong that we live in today. The people that are going to suffer the most are going to be poor areas, beginning in the Black community.”
The city ultimately denied the zoning office’s appeal to block Ayr Wellness’s certificate of use, allowing the dispensary to open. Carollo and Reyes were the two lone “no” votes.
Ayr Wellness, which acquired Liberty Health Sciences for $372 million in 2021, now has 67 locations across the state.
Both Vanisko and the company’s chief revenue officer and chief development officer, Jamie Mendola, reiterated that the Miami market was underserved from a medical marijuana perspective.
“Traveling out to Miami-Dade County, we saw something like 62,800 to one ratio of population dispensary, which is pretty huge,” Vanisko says. “Miami proper is even more dramatic than that.”
Mendola says much of Carollo’s and Reyes’ previous claims about cannabis have been dispelled.
“There’s a lot of good studies that are out there that show that youth incidents of using cannabis have decreased, which is not what people expected, and certainly the fear-mongering crowd, you know, everyone’s just going to be using this all the time. It’s been the inverse.
“In any market that has underserved regulated access with demand that is there, the demand will be met one way or another. It’s either the traditional market or it’s the intoxicating hemp market or its other substances in almost every case that are going to be unregulated, untested, and less safe.”
“}]] The City of Miami dragged its feet in allowing dispensaries since the passage of medical marijuana in 2016. Read More
