LOS ANGELES—The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is working with local authorities to clamp down on cannabis dispensaries near school campuses, according to officials.
“Since I arrived in Los Angeles, I have heard reports about dispensaries that are located across the street from some of our schools,” Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho said in a statement. “If this were your child, would you want a dispensary in your neighborhood or zip code? As caretakers of our community’s children, we must ensure that we keep them safe, healthy and thriving.”
LAUSD officials said they’re concerned about new cannabis-infused products that look like regular candies and gummies and incidents of children mistakenly ingesting such products.
“Los Angeles Unified is proactively working to ensure that students remain safe from adverse effects of marijuana which have been noted in other states,” the statement reads.
Last month, a fourth-grade student in the Twin Rivers Unified School District in Sacramento, California, shared marijuana-infused candy with classmates, according to Fox News.
“The cannabis candy was in a package that resembled Skittles,” the district said in a statement. “We find this whole situation distressing—edible marijuana products in packages that resemble popular brands of candy.”
Similar incidents of students sharing marijuana candies with classmates have occurred in Ohio and Pennsylvania this month—with the Ohio students experiencing nausea, elevated heart rates, and hallucinations and the Pennsylvania students being hospitalized and later released.
Los Angeles Unified has more than 270 campuses throughout the city, and it’s currently unclear how many of them have marijuana dispensaries nearby.
None of the licensed existing marijuana dispensaries were allowed to operate within 700 feet of a school, according to a spokesperson for Los Angeles’s Department of Cannabis Regulation—formed in 2017 and responsible for commercial cannabis license issuing and regulation.
The spokesperson told The Epoch Times that if a retail cannabis business is closer than 700 feet to a school, it’s likely because of one of the three following circumstances: The cannabis shop was deemed eligible at the location before the school’s license was publicly available on the State Board of Education website, the school doesn’t have a license issued to operate at its current location, or the business isn’t licensed by the city and is engaged in unlicensed commercial cannabis activity.
