More than eight years following the passage of Proposition 64, all 24 of San Bernardino County’s municipalities are selling medically-related cannabis products and seven are selling or have cleared the way for the sale of marijuana for intoxicative effect.
The county has come a long way from the days when law enforcement throughout the 20,105-square mile jurisdiction routinely made a practice of arresting and prosecuting marijuana users, and in some cases seeing to it that those trafficking in the substance spent upwards of a decade in state prison.
In the mid-to-late 1960s and into the 1970s, 1980s 1990s and first decade of the Third Millennium, as marijuana use escalated from what it had been among previous generations, San Bernardino County law enforcement under sheriffs Frank Bland, Floyd Tidwell, Dick Williams, Gary Penrod and Rod Hoops, multiple police chiefs of the county’s various cities and district attorneys Lowell Lathrop, Jim Cramer, Dennis Kottmeier, Dennis Stout and Mike Ramos proved as or more committed to enforcing restrictions against marijuana use and sales as their counterparts in any of the Golden State’s 57 other counties. Moreover, the political leadership throughout San Bernardino County, from the board of supervisors to the mayors and council members of all of what are now its 24 municipalities – 22 cities and two incorporated towns – were equally adamant about preventing the proliferation of cannabis.
In 1996, the state’s voters made a major liberalization of California law as concerns marijuana with the passage of Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use of Marijuana Act, which legalized the substance for medical use, conditional upon the user having obtained a prescription for the drug from a licensed physician.
Proposition 215 left up to local jurisdictions whether they would tolerate the presence, i.e., permit and license, establishments from which the drug could be sold or marketed, those venues being dispensaries.
Officials in San Bernardino County were averse to making marijuana commercially available. For more than 15 years following the passage of Proposition 215, no municipalities in San Bernardino County nor county government consented to allowing medical marijuana dispensaries to operate.
The City of Needles broke the ice in 2012, when it permitted five dispensaries to set up shop in the county’s easternmost city along the banks of the Colorado River and moved to allow the drug to be cultivated in indoor facilities as well. Three years later, Adelanto undertook to allow cultivation of the plant in enclosed warehouses within a specially zoned portion of its industrial district.
With the 2016 passage of Proposition 64, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, the use and sale of marijuana for intoxicative purposes was legalized in California. As was the case with Proposition 215, there was a provision in Proposition 64 that entrusted to local jurisdictions a determination as to whether they would allow the sale of marijuana to take place within their realm of authority.
Neither Needles nor Adelanto missed a stroke in transitioning from allowing the sale of medical marijuana to permitting the sale of recreational marijuana. Officials with both cities sought to cash in on the liberalization of the law by clearing the way for commercial cannabis activity to take place within their respective city limits subject to zoning limitations, permitting all order of cultivation with the single restriction that it take place indoors, and allowing medical marijuana and intoxicative marijuana to be sold along with cannabis products. The cities also permitted and courted marijuana/cannabis product manufacturers, as well as researchers and marijuana product innovators to locate within their confines.
In Adelanto, city officials, in particular then-Mayor Rich Kerr, said the intention of city fathers was to transform Adelanto into “the marijuana capital of California.” Over time, Kerr and another member of the city council, Jermaine Wright, ended up being indicted, convicted and sent to prison for accepting bribes from some of the cannabis industry business applicants flooding the city. A third city councilman narrowly avoided indictment.
Thereafter, the cities of San Bernardino and Barstow moved to permit commercial marijuana and cannabis operations. Hesperia chose to allow businesses that deliver marijuana products to customers to function out of a limited portion of its industrial zone, without allowing direct sales to take place from any premises within the city.
In the aftermath of the passage of Proposition 64, Barstow, like most of the other cities in San Bernardino County, stalled in the face of the change in the law. Some two years on, in early 2019, Barstow officials, perhaps prompted by citizens inquiring as to when the city was going to get around to updating its ordinances regarding both medical and recreational marijuana sales and take advantage of its geographical luck in that it enjoys a prime location on the route between San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and lower San Bernardino counties and Las Vegas, undertook an effort to reconcile itself with reality and jettison its historical aversion to marijuana. Having reached a conclusion that the city would boost its municipal revenues by tapping into the lucrative marijuana sales market through some order of permitting and taxing regime, the city council temporized in actuating that plan for more than 18 months. This was partially because of a self-inflicted scandal relating to the way in which it delegated responsibility for making a determination as to how it would regulate the marijuana industry and profit from it once it fully committed to the decision to allow marijuana-related businesses to operate within city limits.
Curiously, city officials, at least initially, conducted themselves very quietly in seeking to come to a determination as to how the new sector of Barstow’s economy was to be regulated, carrying out backroom discussions that were not done publicly. Unbeknownst to the city’s residents was that Councilman Rich Harpole was serving as the chairman of an ad-hoc committee looking at the ins and outs of allowing the cultivation, sales, distribution, and manufacturing of marijuana, cannabis or cannabis-based products in the city, pursuant to a licensing or permitting regime, one that would entail requirements that such operations meet a set of criteria, be licensed as businesses within the city and be subject to a tax specifically levied on the growers of marijuana or the manufacturers and purveyors of cannabis or cannabis-based products.
When it was revealed that Harpole was leading the effort to set the parameters of how the sale of marijuana and cannabis products was to achieve legitimization in Barstow, the entire community did a doubletake and then, as publicity attended the circumstance, its political and governmental leadership went into convulsions.
Harpole spent nearly 24 years with the Barstow Police Department, starting with the agency in 1984 and rising to the rank of lieutenant before retiring in 2008. Early in his career as an officer, Harpole had been directly involved in more than 250 marijuana-related arrests and throughout his entire time as a higher-ranking officer and supervisor he participated indirectly in over 1,500 marijuana-related arrests and operations. Curiously, in spite of and perhaps even because of Harpole’s history as a crusader against marijuana, his council colleagues saw no difficulty, problem or conflict in his overseeing the framing of the policy which would provide for the eventual legalized commercialization of cannabis in the City of Barstow. That commercialization would eventually generate substantial revenue for the city in terms of permit and licensing fees as well as standard sales tax, excise tax and the levying of a city marijuana tax.
In 2019, Harpole was provided with an annual pension of $79,433.04.
Disgraced and filled with shame over the prospect that one of its members was angling to enhance the city’s revenues through skimming its piece of the action on the sale of marijuana after that council member had made his way in the world for nearly a quarter of a century in some measure by throwing pot smokers and marijuana traffickers in jail and prison, the city council dropped, like a hot potato, efforts toward welcoming marijuana dispensaries into the 41.3-square mile, 25,123-population city. In December 2019, Harpole abruptly resigned from the city council and departed from California entirely.
With its council members mortified at the prospect of being excoriated for the hypocrisy of overseeing a governmental operation making money off of the same activity for which one of their colleagues had actively engaged in criminalizing, it was not until, April 2021, 16 months after Harpole was gone, that the city welcomed its first marijuana dispensary.
At present, Harpole’s annual pension has grown to $90,683.33, a portion of which is paid by taxes paid by those purchasing marijuana and fees paid by those selling it.
While the remainder of other San Bernardino County cities eschewed jumping on the marijuana bandwagon, Fontana in particular seemed to be caught in the ethos of the past in that its officials remained determined to keep what was once deemed “the plant with its roots in hell” from becoming a part of its citizenry’s lives.
The Adult Use of Marijuana Act permitted adults to grow marijuana for personal use, with a six-plant cultivation limit at any given time. Fontana burnished its reputation for being zealously anti-drug and anti-marijuana by refusing to allow that aspect of the law to be fulfilled. City officials there overstepped the city’s authority in both regulating and preventing its residents from growing marijuana on their residential property or within their homes. The city council passed an ordinance which required that anyone who sought to exercise the permission given to California residents to cultivate six plants per adult allowed under Proposition 64 had to obtain a city-issued permit first, which entailed proof of extensive security measures on the premises where the marijuana was being grown and that those premises be subject to inspection by city officials around the clock, meaning that to grow marijuana in Fontana one had to surrender his or her privacy rights.
This regulation regime was so draconian it resulted in legal action being taken against the city, which ultimately resulted in a court ruling preventing the city from enforcing those regulations.
For that reason, among others, many people were astounded when in July 2022 Fontana lurched 180 degree diametrically with a council vote to allow marijuana sales within city limits.
In July 2024, after city officials in Twentynine Palms relented, the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians opened the Red Falcon Dispensary on Native American reservation land near Tortoise Rock Casino, which is also operated by the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians.
Last month, the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians opened another Red Falcon Dispensary, this time in Yucca Valley, also on tribal reservation property. The marijuana sold at the Red Falcon dispensaries is grown by the tribe on its reservation property in Coachella.
This brings to seven municipalities – the cities of San Bernardino, Fontana, Hesperia, Adelanto, Twentynine Palms and Barstow, along with the Town of Yucca Valley – that permit the commercial sale of marijuana.
In all 24 municipalities in San Bernardino County as well as in unincorporated areas of the county, certain cannabis-related products such as creams and CBD oil are available for sale in drug stores, grocery stores, shops and even in some convenience markets and liquor stores.
-Mark Gutglueck