Kern County Supervisor Mike Maggard has asked county staff to explore the creation of a mobile dispensary system for medical marijuana.

Nobody on the Kern County Board of Supervisors wants to keep medical marijuana patients from having access to the substance they use to deal with a variety of illnesses, Maggard said.

But supervisors don’t want marijuana sold out of storefronts in unincorporated Kern County. The board voted, last month, to ban commercial cannabis operations in county jurisdictions.

Maggard’s idea would be to permit the establishment of brick-and-mortar businesses that could distribute marijuana to medical patients.

[related_articles location=”left” show_article_date=”false” article_type=”automatic-primary-section” curated_ids=””]But those businesses could not allow walk-up patients or sell to recreational users of marijuana. They would operate strictly as a base for companies that would take orders from patients and deliver their medicine to them at their home or other location.

Maggard asked the County Administrative Office to look into the possibililty of creating rules that would permit such limited mobile businesses to operate in the county.

He also asked to develop a fee system on mobile delivery businesses that would support their regulation and create a funding stream to combat illegal store-front shops that have operated in the county and cites in defiance of local regulations for years.

Maggard’s request also calls for Kern County to reach out to the state and federal government to develop better rules for what illnesses are aided by medical marijuana and a better system for overseeing the doctors’ recommendations needed for a person to become a medical marijuana patient.

Finally, Maggard’s referral called for a system to be developed that would require patients to have a photo identification card that could be scanned so that the flow of cannabis to patients could be tracked.

Maggard called for the rules to be developed by county staff as quickly as possible.

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