How to make Chicago’s pot-smoking laws more fair citywide

A City Council committee properly snuffed out — for the time being — a mayoral effort to create more licensed locations for recreational marijuana smoking.

But in the interest of keeping pot-smoking practices aboveboard across the whole city, the aldermen, mayor and state lawmakers should get back to work on this issue. And soon.

The City Council’s licensing committee on Wednesday decided to recess rather than vote on an ordinance proposed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot aimed at expanding the number of places where recreational marijuana can be smoked legally.

The proposed ordinance would have allowed marijuana smoking inside Chicago’s more than 40 tobacco smoke shops, in addition to the city’s nine marijuana dispensaries. But a group of black and Latino aldermen earlier this week found fault with this plan because there are very few tobacco shops and dispensaries in predominantly black and brown neighborhoods.

The unintended consequences of the ordinance, they warned, might be that pot users in black and Latino neighborhoods set up unlicensed places to smoke, or just do so more in public places, leading to arrests.

The proposed ordinance is handcuffed by state law, and that’s the problem. The state restricts marijuana smoking to private residences and dispensaries while allowing municipalities to include tobacco shops — but no other locations. That means no marijuana-only smoke shops or Amsterdam-style cafes where weed smoking would be legal.

In a written statement, the mayor’s office said it will “continue working with City Council members to refine the ordinance by working within the confines of the state statute.”

That’s a start. But the solution lies in revisiting state law to expand the type of businesses where marijuana usage would be legal.

Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th), the mayor’s City Council floor leader, said the state’s marijuana statutes could be revisited after the new General Assembly is sworn in later this month.

Nobody wants legal pot-smoking spots to overrun a neighborhood, which the city easily could avoid through proper zoning and regulation. But increasing the number of locations where cannabis legally can be consumed would make it less likely that people would smoke pot in public stairwells, gangways and the like, inviting arrest.

As Ald. Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez (33rd) noted earlier this week, legalizing recreational marijuana was “righting a wrong in history where so many people were criminalized — mostly people of color.”

Legalized pot cannot be allowed to do the same.

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