hello everyone my name is roger colton and i'd like to welcome you today to community conversations on behalf of the belmont citizen herald i would like to thank the belmont media center for making its studios available to provide this public service through the community conversations podcast we hope to bring varying parts of the belmont community to the public into day show i have invited dr david alpert to join us dr alberts chair of the belmont board of health under new statute approved by the voters last fall massachusetts legalize the recreational use of marijuana under that statute the authority and the responsibility to write local regulations for marijuana dispensary as has been given to the local boards of health and it is that topic that i'd like to talk about today david welcome to q mean community conversations in thanks for taking time away from your day to day patients to come over and talk with us so thank you for inviting me roger i think it's important to try to clarify some questions that citizens have about this it's a whole new area we're going in so i think this is a great opportunity to get some good information across david before we really get started on regulating can you tell me a bit about yourself what kind of medical practice you have helen have you been at it oh sure roger thank you for asking so in my other life i'm a podiatrist and solo practice i've been practicing in belmont actually for thirty one years over i'm married with three wonderful children a couple in college and one still going through the belmont high school and one of him a heck of an artist if i remember or thank you very much yes that i'm is really pretty good with a pencil and my youngest at the high school is heading up the hurdles team so i was going to say a runner and we have to keep his feet in shape of course i can you give us a rundown on the board of health i seem to remember seeing recently that the board of health has it's either immediately or very recently passed or recently coming a form raising bumblebees and yes and then you just had a form on opioids that's correct so the short answer is that if you don't know too much about what we're doing probably means we're doing a good job because we're trying to keep things healthy and safe and controlled the boards of health in the commonwealth of massachusetts are really one of the most powerful boards that exist we are completely autonomous the only person that can override anything we do is the attorney general of massachusetts we are a legislative as well as an overseeing body and we write legislation again very often things that you may not even realize and other things you do for instance we were the nd town in the commonwealth to raise the age of being able to purchase cigarettes to twenty one this is something we did unilaterally because we really thought it was for the betterment of the town other time as we look into see what's going on and your bumblebee is your the latest thing that's come across to us because citizens of the town are looking to be allowed to have and raise honeybees and we need to make sure not so much to stop it because we're not really trying to be punitive and restrictive but rather make sure that everybody is healthy not only the bees because we want to make sure it's a healthy environment but the people living nearby because of course you don't want to have one person appy and the other person if your partner lives there are being infiltrated we did something similar with chickens you've got now got into this if i can tell you my bias upfront and then have you respond to it because i think a lot of people might might think the same way and my attitude is sort of changing bad ten i thought that gosh regulating the sale of marijuana can't be that much different from regulating the sale of alcohol or regulating the sale of that tobacco do you have an opinion about the car right  it's actually a blending of the two the town of belmont has an alcohol board and they're the ones that were given the responsibility of overseeing the licenses and handling the licenses that authority was given by the state of massachusetts so if you remember because i know you were in town with this happen and we no longer were dry we had to apply to the state legislature to be allowed to issue x number of licenses for liquor the board of health actually has nothing to do with liquor in town except across the obvious inspections as we do for any restaurant make sure the glasses are clean and eccentric so we don't oversee those licenses we don't and them out on the other side tobacco is completely under us and we set as i just said the age of sale of tobacco the number of licenses and who can sell them we recently for instance changed the by lower a little bit that pharmacies can no longer sell tobacco because it's kind of a mixed message you're going in for incredibly healthy things and then you've got cigarettes behind the counter and it's something that c v s did they took upon themselves so the truth is it doesn't really affect anything in town except for the osco over at star market and they've been pulled out because of selling liquor the point of story is that by looking at the way that we regulate tobacco sales by limiting the number of licenses by limiting the location by limiting who can do it we're going to be able to oversee how marijuana is distributed in the town so in that regard it's more like tobacco than it is liquor of course by design it's more like liquor as far as the way that you know that way people use it that it's more for social recreation than than tobacco and i'd like to stay on alcohol for for just a minute because another place where i think i'm i think i think this that i'm changing my mind is i came into this thinking that well the voters have made the use of marijuana legal so the town of belmont has to let it be so but then the more i thought about that the more i thought well that's that's not necessarily the case because alcohol has been legal forever and it's only been fairly recently a forever well decades but there was a time not too long ago when you couldn't buy alcohol in the well that's correct and i would say to you that it's really following the will of the people with alcohol because why did we leave being a dry town because it was brought forth by a group of citizens that said we want to find a restaurant we're not going to get a fine restaurant if you're a member that was the right behind right and so it was the majority of the population i feel very strongly to the st part of your statement almost seventy percent of this town voted for question for in the last election seventy percent of the voters of this town said we want recreational marijuana legalized i think as representatives you know duly elected by the citizens we need to follow through with in fact their wishes so i could say with their stated wh ultimately of course we can governments have been known to do that for a long time it was one of the things that was pointed out when we met with the selectmen several weeks ago that we really feel that we need to move forward with this to meet the will of the people which was we want recreational marijuana in some way shape or form in belmont so let's talk about the form of that regulation and again let me pose something to you and see what your reaction is it seems to me that there are two types of regulation dispensary one is almost zoning in nature where can a dispensary be located can it be close to a school can it be close to a park what kinds of advertising so that on the one hand on the other hand there are the business operations where the licensing of a business and perhaps a background  check on the owner and are those legitimate distinctions they are and this is the uniqueness of marijuana versus alcohol and tobacco and again i think it's appropriate to look at all three of these alcohol licenses the permission to write them was granted by the state and overseen by the town tobacco everything is within the town marijuana or on the other hand the licenses are going to be issued by academies board of the state so they're going to be the ones that are going to be feting who gets licensed they're going to need to put up a bond a fairly significant one these licenses are not going to be cheap i've heard everything from ten dollars to twenty five thousand dollars there's going to be a background screen in the same way that they do screen people with tobacco licenses but this way the state is going to be doing it so the state will issue the license what belmont does is what you talked about number one is we can say how many if any and number two where can they be some of them are incredibly obvious parameters we certainly don't want it anywhere near a school you don't want it near a daycare center then you start getting into well do you want it near a playground do you want it near a church and you have to remember that belmont's four square miles and you could actually you know indirectly legislate out any possibility of having a dispensary because you could make it so egregious that nobody could meet these parameters we don't want to do that my guess and this is purely speculation because the town has not gotten to this point is we're going to map the location very similar to the liquor laws it one thing to and it would seem is it seems that there are two ways to go one is assuming that there's more than one dispensary in and i would think that's a fair assumption on the one hand i could see where people would say we don't want them close to each other we want them through throughout the town on the other hand i could see people really reasonably saying no we want that that's exactly what we do want we want them  there is that an area and we can keep an eye on and on them and everything goes through what you have to remember these are still businesses and to say we're only going to allow three marijuana dispensaries and they all have to be in question square that's not really fair to the spirit of what we have going on here again this is now david alpers opinion talking that i would see one in each of the centers and i can see one again you know you've got a liquor store in belmont center you've got one coaching square you now have one in waverly square because you've got one of the star market i would say that i could see something similar to that where the populous can reach it where their business areas anyway i mean this is why these cent exist is to have a variety of businesses and so the hopefully blend in now you could say to me ok but what about if one of the businesses objects to it doesn't want their well you could have said the same thing about alcohol right yeah right so it's ultimately has to be viewed as business friendly because if you're going to allow and you don't want to allow something that's doomed to fail i i agree with that and  marijuana marijuana has been legalized so it is in many ways the sale of marijuana is no different from the sale of well the way it stands now is if and of we're just assuming here roger right but if you have marijuana in your home and when your wife and family are enjoying it you're not breaking the law how you obtained it at the moment may come into question because currently there's no recreational places but let's say you were visiting denver and you picked up some and somehow you got a year because you're not supposed to fly with it you would be perfectly legal to have it within your home what we're looking at is how we can legally get it to the citizens now the way it stands now is that towns are allowed to limit the number of places that we already know the reason that the state delayed the onset of this by six months is to figure out a process that towns can opt out it's the opting out that is very murky right now so we technically could not opt out now but that's going to be allowed when when the state finishes doing what it does once again then it comes back to the town and says but the town had seventy percent population saying they wanted it so listen board a health listen selectman and the certainly involves the selectmen as well we need to find a way to make this that you know the perfect compromise nobody's completely happy so that enough people are happy that's what's going to come into play with it as far as exactly how we bring it to the people that doesn't overly disrupt the town and at the same time meets the letter of the law and i want to take one more look at what we thin the scope of and i talk about the scope of what you're going to do but this all is going to be made that well it hasn't been decided yet but in all likelihood we're the ones that are going to be  helping to write the by law right and we will be issuing them within the town after they get their license from the state that these regulations need town meeting approval actually interesting mail if they not they don't need town meeting approval need voter approval and so in order to get it to the voters we need to go through town meeting to put it on a town wide interest but the way that the state put it and i think this was very smart of them is that in order to opt out or in order to limit the number of licenses it must be put up to a voter opinion so once again that seventy percent is going to get the chance to say we want this yes or if the town puts up and says we're trying to opt out the seventy percent gets a chance to vote it down so town meetings only job is to get it up in front of the voters so again going back to the scope of this what's going to come before the voters  in addition to where does it go would regulations include things like advertising you know what sorts of advertising can go up in a building and secure i could think well advertising number one of course we already have senator we already have you know regulations you know as far as the make up of the signs that's going to be a gray area or you're starting to get into st amendment rights because after all you're selling something that's legal you know on the other you know so they couldn't have i don't know three naked people smoking cigarettes you know so and you can't restrict it you're going to be allowed to sell paraphernalia because if you're going to make marijuana legal you're going to be have to make the use of it through tools so bongs paper rolling machines all this is going to be legal is now to whether the shops sell it or not i mean i guess that's up to them ultimately it's the same thing with the food products so again the license for the actual products themselves will come from the state we're going to oversee how many they are and where they're located that it's just going to be like any other business so they can put up some thirty foot neon sign in the middle of christian square because nobody can but they do need to be allowed to say this is what we do you know here's an interesting thing that i did not saying is going to happen but is something that could happen that maybe you don't know  the requirements for selling liquor is you cannot see the pouring of liquor through from the street so if you go through the restaurants you will see that either the bar can't be seen from the street or in the case of mar frost the lower half of the windows and that was something that the liquor board came up with that they didn't want people to be walking by and seeing alcohol consumed could they frost the windows of these stores are required so you don't see the marijuana containers up on the shelves that's an interesting conversation point i don't know wow well let me lot of tentacles with this yes it's just extraordinarily complex  much more complex if i may i don't want you to get a big head it's a lot more complex and i think a lot of people including myself would have thought well at the risk of having a big head if you going to do it right yes it does become complex you know if and end if you want to control over it because here's the other thing belmont cannot to do nothing and simply take the state regulations and leave it at that which point we could have however many and we don't have a say over where they are now obviously nobody wants that so the question then becomes how much oversight do you want historically and i personally it's a good thing that more wants a lot of oversight what's going on at the citizens certainly want what they want  want to make sure that it's safe it's healthy it's appropriate for the neighborhood and family community that we have you know we're not afraid mean when you know we're not a marble where we have these enormous retail areas that you could bury something like this  so yes the selectmen the board of health the police is certainly going to be involved in this the planning board is going to be involved in it there's a lot of work that's going to be having to go on behind this and very honestly we all took a really happy sigh of relief when we got six more months because we were very fast tracked or to original so that that was i don't want to get off track here but that was not a bad thing that now know they helpful to absolutely true and and again it's not that they're trying to stop it they're trying to make sure it's done properly so no i don't think anybody was upset that we've got six more months to do this one thing i would like to do for a moment is to try to paint a picture a verbal picture of  what people might expect to see in a marijuana dispensary because let me tell you i i keep talking about i went into this thinking one thing and then i changed my opinion so the more i learn the more i want and they weigh it right there at the cash register in and then you pay for it and so i was thinking that that's what a marijuana dispensary would be like but within the more i thought about it the more i read or types of marijuana i know that is part of it i mean i would be part of it but there is much more to it all absolutely and i will tell you my experience comes from doing a little research in colorado because of course they've been doing it for a little while but the short answer is that half the shop is going to be exactly as you described and obviously depending upon how much the owner wants to put into it to make it nice and less nice but yeah you're going to see big apothecary jars of varying strains of marijuana varying tastes and styles of marijuana you know you could buy buds you can buy a broken down into into the leaves themselves and you will buy it by weight and you could actually like a tobacco shop go in and say well of course you know i want to have you know i don't want five percent i want seven percent but i wanted to have a sweetness to it and so they'll blend it for you so you'll actually have almost like a barista or a bartender putting together your particular mix of marijuana that's one half of the shop the edible is the other half of the shop the brownies gummy bears candies lollipops very lollipops very very popular and these things will also be made available here's an interesting side note the board of health of course oversees food production and consumption in the town we will have no say over this food the state is the one that's going to be expecting going to re ask so your normal regulation over food preparation is going to be displaced if the food preparation involves what the way i understand it it's not going to be allowed to be prepared on site these are going to be packaged brownies these are going to be packaged candies so but we are not going to be inspecting to see you know the handling of it other than the package so what it was done at the factory we have no idea but you know that it's an interesting thing that was taken from the boards of health and again it's not unique to belmont this is the whole commonwealth that we will have no oversight on the safety and quality of the food and it will be sold there and one thing that i was thinking i'll tell you one of my pet peeves and i had to know if it's a pet peeve that when companies started to mix alcohol with the sugary fruit drinks and sell them in inconvenient stores in kids started to i don't know if kids did that it seemed like for a while when my daughter was in high school authority of the town that that's done not how i used to not at the moment not another analogy would be tobacco nowadays we have these fruity tobaccos and fruity papers that are obviously marketed towards young people  one of the reasons we bumped it up to twenty one and that was a way that we could regulate it without saying ok you can sell it you just can't sell it to anybody on the twenty one and that we were keeping it out of the hands of kids you're right i mean at the end of the day these people are trying to sell a product and they're going to do whatever marketing they can and making it attractive by putting it into gummy bears or into lollipops does make it more exciting more enticing to kids it's go thereby need to move more oversight by the parents and that's a whole other way in the conversation but the short answer is that things like what we're doing here now roger is hopefully going to educate the town and we're going to have public meetings over this we're going to let people hear what we're thinking what we're going on this is not going to be done in smoke filled rooms because people need to be aware that this is something that's entering our lives and parents need to have an oversight teachers are going to need to have an oversight more because kids bring candy to school all the time here and let's talk about since you brought up the notion that public involvement can can you take us through or do you have a vision at this point of what the process is going to be i would think that this topic is one that people will really have more than a little interest in oh i would agree and i again with seventy percent of people wanting it i think they're going to want to make sure it moves forward however i think the process is going to be a pretty boilerplate process that the selectmen on the board of health again with input from the police and the planning board will come up with a suggested by law that will then be brought to open meetings at the public not town meeting but open meetings open hearings if you will and that's how we did it with we're going to do with the bees and how we did it with so an off leash program you probably heard something about the fact we rework the off leash program  it's what we did we brought alcohol to the town so the people will get a chance to voice in on we don't want six licenses we only want three or you don't want them here we want them here or you know mr chairman what was the board's thinking when they wanted to do this so there's absolutely going to be and by the way they'll also be e mail input they'll be phone call input so bit people aren't able to get to a meeting doesn't mean they're shut out you know i think i can speak confidently th do the same thing that we do with those and we do this all the time with bylaws that we're proposing so yeah there's going to be absolute opportunities for people to make sure that this fits into our community and that's really all that you know that's not smoke that's important this is going to be a change maybe not quite as big as alcohol but it's going to be a change for this town and we don't want to be a negative one and i will tell you today that we will bring you back for this i know when and when you're further along so you can talk about this these are some of the proposals we're making and this is what our thinking is and hopefully people will tune i'm going to do it i think that the great one thing that i think people would have been interest is a provision the towns are allowed to ed two percent town tax to the sale of marijuana products here is the thing the town has to enact it it does not happen automatically so the state gets three  five percent above the sales tax for every sale of marijuana that happens automatically the towns and the cities in the commonwealth have to specifically say we want two percent and if you remember we were able to do that food sales and town that the town had two eight percent exactly what i've been present so we i think it's point seventy five that we that the town collects with every food sale that's made in town we can do up to two percent why is this important well aside from obviously helping the coffers a little bit there's going to be a cost of overseeing this you know my staff at the health department going to have to work through paperwork and regulations the police are obviously going to be a little busier there's going to be time as we've already spoken to put this together the town should have to bear the burden of that and so if we have inspectors and police that are going to need to do more there should be money to help pay for that and that's what this two percent will help do i mean even though it goes goes into the general fund right so and this was brought through the selectmen they're very well aware of it so when this does come in front of town meeting in the vote as part of it's going to be to approve the acceptance of two percent of revenues to be added for the town so that's a in people's minds is does the town of bell not have the right or let me not see it that way what happens if now mike does nothing if belmont does nothing not that they say we don't want anything but they bet if the board of health just we don't do it we don't i think we don't get the two percent we are underneath purely the state regulations which means anybody can come along with a proper state license and open up  marijuana shop any place they want to so this this is really an issue it's our hands to take control you know it's not and well and technically to stop it completely again as we've spoken about i personally don't think we should but to take control of where how many you know when hours we talk about hours of operation but again it's a business we can regulate the hours this is open you know so i mean this is our opportunity to make it fit us if we do absolutely nothing and honestly roger that's not that's not going to happen that's a this like you know i'm bored you know we're on board the police are on board so that's not going to happen but i'm sure there is sometimes in the commonwealth that are security if any need to be done even waste disposal i was thinking it would be unless well again that will probably mirror alcohol to some extent you know i mean i would i don't know because i that's actually a good question to me i don't know if the liquor stores were required to put in extra levels of security i honestly don't know that but certainly i think we'd follow something similar disposal absolutely and for that matter not just can go in a lot of different directions well david this is fascinating stuff and i appreciate you taking time to be here we are talking today with dr david out for who is chair of the board of health and the belmont board of health under the state statute which was approved by the voters last fall or all boards of health all just all local boards of health have been given the authority and the responsibility to promulgated local regulations for the dispensing of marijuana for recreational units in their respective communities so again thank you we'll have you back as you get more into the process to help explain it to to the community it would be my pleasure and roger if i can but one small plug and if any of your listeners out there have questions about this please reach out to the health department of the town this is what we're here for we're happy to answer questions as the process goes along i would like to think the listeners for tuning in today you can listen to this podcast by accessing it online at w w w dot network i would encourage our listeners both to stay tuned to the belmont media center and to read the weekly belmont citizen herald for continuing information about events going on throughout the town of belmont i'm your host of community conversations roger c thank you again for listening and i will talk to you again in two weeks