Changing the Rules on Smoking Pot

After passing a bill that legalized medical marijuana earlier this month, a New Jersey lawmaker touted the safeguards built into the measure, saying the Garden State didn't want to be like California.

"We looked at the pitfalls of California and made a more restrictive bill," Assemblyman Reed Gusciora said.

Yesterday, Los Angeles officials put their own restrictions on legal marijuana, which will require the vast majority of the estimated 1,000 medical pot dispensaries to close.

The city council voted 9-3 to limit the number of dispensaries and to require those that stay open to move out of neighborhoods and into industrial areas. (The measure restricts the number of dispensaries to 70 but 80 existing stores are grandfathered.) It also restricts hours to 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The city's mayor still has to sign off on the measure.

Even LA council members sympathetic to people who need pot to treat pain say the number of sellers got out of hand. In what's becoming a standard measure to determine whether you have too many marijuana dispensaries in your town, one councilman said the stores outnumber Starbucks locations.

“These are out of control,” Ed Reyes tells the New York Times. “Our city has more of these than Starbuckses.”

But it's not just the la-la land of Los Angeles that is coping with how to regulate legal weed.

In Grand Rapids, people who grow medical marijuana (they're called caregivers in Michigan) should be regulated as home-based businesses, local lawmakers decided yesterday.