Dennis RomeroA poll touted over the weekend shows a measure that would allow most L.A. city marijuana dispensaries to keep operating is winning among voters. One that would shut down most pot shops is losing.
Good news, perhaps, for the marijuana nation. The poll, however, has flaws that even backers of the pro-dispensary law, called Measure F, acknowledge:
A memo by the pro-F camp obtained by the Weekly shows its misgivings about the Survey USA poll, which has 54 percent of voters saying yes to F and 40 percent saying yes to D, the measure that would shutter most pot shops.
The poll has been touted by the pro-F camp on social media and to fundraisers as evidence of the measure's winning ways. (City voters will get to weigh in officially on May 21.)
As our colleague Gene Maddaus pointed out last week, the so-called “robo-poll” — it's conducted with automated phone calls to citizens — has deep flaws and has come up with results not replicated elsewhere.
Credit: Susan Slade Sanchez for LA Weekly
Chief among the flaws, as noted by the pro-F camp, is that it assumes a 63 percent voter turnout when the more likely figure is less than 20 percent.
In any case, even F's backers admitted that an internal poll by the D folks that had their measure on top with voters had some truth to it, with F's Garry South telling us, “D is ahead by more.”
Strangely, we think most of you would, in fact, go for more dispensaries rather than cutting the city's 1,000 or so to 100 and change, as D would do.
But D has the bigger, better backers, it would appear, including labor and the Greater Los Angeles Collective Alliance, which represents the older, pre-October 2007 pot shops that would be mostly protected under that law.
F would allow most pot shops to survive so long as operators underwent background checks and the dispensaries adhered to distance requirements (they couldn't be too close to schools) and stricter operating hours.
That measure also would require cannabis to be tested to ensure that it's not toxic.
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