Pauls Valley City Council voted last week to ban new marijuana businesses within its city limits, and will enact home grow permits that subject patients to inspection.

The sun is setting on Pauls Valley cannabis opportunity and patient rights. Despite SQ 788’s attempt to keep a municipality from preventing the opening of retail cannabis establishments, last week Pauls Valley City Council voted to do just that.

Under an ordinance titled “Marijuana Establishments” passed with emergency order, Pauls Valley has banned all commercial license types from opening within its municipal boundaries. The new ordinance also defines hours of operation be from 9a.m.-9p.m. and requires businesses to be closed on Sundays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, July 4th and New Year’s Day, similarly to the way alcohol was once regulated throughout the state. When such regulation is applied to a medical program however, it inadvertently limits patient access and perpetuates a stigma that invalidates the medicinal benefit that so many of Oklahoma’s patients seek with their consumption of cannabis.

The Unity Bill (HB 2612) states municipal and county governing bodies may not enact medical marijuana guidelines that interfere with the rights of a licensed patient or caregiver to cultivate medical marijuana or require patients or caregivers to obtain permits or licenses in addition to the state-required licenses. But Pauls Valley’s Marijuana Establishments Ordinance also requires such permits for patients to cultivate their medicine at home. And the included language “all permits included in this chapter will be inspected,” suggests patients must open the doors of their private residence to municipal inspection if they want to grow any number of plants they are legally permitted to by the state. A patient’s ability to cultivate would then be dependent upon the result of that inspection, which could be subjective. Home grow permit inspections may be further complicated by additional provisions set forth containing cultivation to inside of a single residence and not occupying any space that would impair ingress or egress or the primary use of the room.

Patients who live in rental properties are in even more of a predicament, as they will be required to provide a notarized letter from their landlord granting permission to grow their medicine. By law a tenant may not be penalized solely for their status as a license holder, but nothing prohibits landlords from restricting certain activity in the home or apartment or even on the premises of the home or apartment. If a patient rent, the only real written protection patients have is their ability to consume edibles when lawfully recommended pursuant to OMMA regulations. Even though these laws may seem to conflict with each other, the bottom line is that a home grow might not be seen as a “right” of a licensed patient in a rental home even though provisions grant them permission to cultivate a certain allotment of mature and seedling plants. In the case a patient cannot obtain express written permission to grow in a leased property or does not want to expose their license status to their landlord, they would be forced to into a retail market which is simultaneously being limited in operation and cannot expand.

The way these regulations will locally affect patient rights and personal privacy is the most problematic, but what is troubling on a larger scale is what all aspects together implicate as far as the potential limitations of state business and patient protection provisions.

It’s unknown if everything in the ordinance would stick if challenged in court or if a challenge will even be mounted. Pauls Valley’s Marijuana Establishments Ordinance also included a severability clause though, which means if a court did rule certain provisions of the ordinance invalid the remainder will still apply.

The full ordinance can be expanded to view and read below.