During Tuesday night's hearing, the Sacramento City Council voted unanimously to extend the citywide moratorium on medical cannabis dispensary openings and expansion for ten months and fifteen days, totaling a year of halted development. The city is now 42 days into the moratorium's original 45. In that time, city government has been collecting information on cannabis clubs and invited existing dispensaries to register themselves within 30 days, a time window that closed on August 16. The registration has ceased; the research has not. "We felt that 45 days was just too short," said City Special Projects Manager Michelle Heppner, who helped conduct the fact-finding mission. "Things moved

Regardless of the smoldering controversy cannabis stirs up in Sacramento City Hall, the state Capitol and Washington D.C., the global scientific community has examined the drug with increasing interest recently. Local patients and doctors can't say enough about the groundbreaking potential of THC as a pharmaceutical. Cannabis is handled at Oaksterdam University in Oakland. There's a fairly large medical cannabis community in Sacramento, of patients, caregivers and researchers. Some dispensaries work directly with patients and doctors to bridge the gap between medical knowledge and social support. Sacramento resident Thomas Coy has worked with the Capitol Wellness dispensary since it

As part of the fact-finding process of the cannabis dispensary moratorium, the Sacramento city government is taking a look at how, exactly, medical pot stores operate. Without many precedents to refer to, dispensaries don't have solidly established business practices. All dispensaries are somewhat similar, but none are alike. Dispensaries all have the same basic foundation. By state law, pot shops must be collectives or cooperatives of medicinal cannabis patients. After ill Californians get cannabis recommendations, they have the ability to medicate and cultivate as they see fit. Last year, California Attorney General Jerry Brown published some guidelines on how many plants (six) and how