Come January, you can legally buy recreational pot in Santa Cruz County

Anyone, 21 years or older, will be able to buy cannabis in unincorporated Santa Cruz County legally come the first of the year, according to Santa Cruz County Supervisor John Leopold. Leopold said Monday that the county has been working with about a dozen retail pot shops and believes they are right on schedule for Jan. 1.

“We expect on Jan. 1 that people will be able to purchase adult-use cannabis in Santa Cruz County at the existing retail sites,” Leopold said.

Ever since the passage of Prop. 64, dispensaries like Kind Peoples Collective have been getting calls about whether they’re selling recreational marijuana. You can’t legally buy it just yet but you can find it on the grey market. But that is something community advocacy manager Christopher Carr has working against.

“We are coming out the shadows and into the light and the idea here is to not have harmful things go into the medicine and have the industry reflect the values of Santa Cruz,” Carr said.

Prop. 64 allows people to have up to an ounce of marijuana and grow up to six plants at home. Since the law passed, the state of California has been trying to figure out the best way to regulate the sale of cannabis in what is expected to be a multibillion-dollar industry.

“The way the state law works is we can be more restrictive than the state but we can’t be more relaxed than the state,” Leopold said. The law does give the power to local cities and counties to regulate it how they want, but Leopold said the whole process can still be confusing.

“When you have the federal government saying one thing, the state saying another and then local jurisdictions in California all have different regulations, there’s not really a precedent for that kind of activity,” Leopold said.

While it appears the retail side of things is right on schedule, Leopold said the cultivation of commercial cannabis is a whole other challenge.

“For the commercial cultivation of this plant, that has been a lot more trying because we had a set of regulations on the book(s) but we didn’t have any enforcement (and) it caused some problems so we went out and did a community process.”

Eventually, the Board of Supervisors decided it was in the best interest of the community to do an environmental impact report on the effects commercial cannabis cultivation could have on neighborhoods, roads, the air, water and the overall environment.

The results from that EIR are expected in a couple of weeks.