[420 Girl]

LONGMONT, CO — Two burglaries. Two car accidents nearby. One malfunctioning alarm.

It’s not the kind of track record that would draw “America’s Most Wanted.” And for Longmont’s medical marijuana dispensaries, that’s just fine.

Roughly a year after the first dispensary opened in Longmont, serious incidents have been few and far between. A check of police records found 25 calls to Longmont’s dispensaries, most of them either minor or having nothing to do with the business. Only four of the incidents were serious enough to generate a report — and two of those were the car accidents.

That didn’t surprise Scott Reach, the owner of Stone Mountain Wellness, 600 S. Airport Road. Stone Mountain’s address had 14 of the 25 calls, but none were for criminal activity. In fact, four of them were requests for extra patrols while a fifth was a test run.

“The police said ‘If you think you’re being cased, or need an extra patrol to come by, just call dispatch,’” Reach said. “Being two blocks away from a coffee shop doesn’t hurt.”

That sort of good relationship with the police always helps, agreed Larry Hill of The Apothecary, 1314 Coffman St.

“They’ll come by here quite frequently,” Hill said. “And many, many times when I close my doors for the evening, there’s a police car waiting to make sure I get to my car OK. That is not harassment, and it is greatly appreciated.”

He recalled one night when a car pulled up across the street with some “young kids” in it. He’d started to wonder if they might be a problem, when suddenly a police car pulled over on the street. Suddenly, the other car found somewhere else to be.

“I think the only reason he pulled over was to do some paperwork, but I was still glad for that,” Hill said.

It has not been all rosy. On Jan. 6, a burglar broke out the front window of Nature’s Medicine, 1260 S. Hover St. According to police reports, a notebook computer and a small safe were taken.

Police records also show a burglary at the address last November, but the case is still under investigation and details were not immediately available.

Reach noted that while trouble can happen, many other businesses could say the same.

“If you look across the state, how many convenience stores are robbed?” he asked. “How many banks are robbed? We get a lot of attention because people are always putting us under the microscope, so anything that happens is a much bigger deal.”

There’s a lot a business can do to secure itself, too. For example, Stone
Mountain never leaves any money or marijuana at the dispensary after hours, only opens the door to people who have an appointment, and never lets there be more clients than employees in the dispensary at any one time. And of course, there’s the obvious locks, cameras, alarms and other measures any shop would use.

“You would have to give the same attention to security if you worked for a liquor store, a jewelry store or a bank,” Hill said.

Even good security can sometimes have issues, though, as Hill discovered when his alarm system malfunctioned New Year’s Day.

“I couldn’t get it to reset, so the police came — two young officers came and asked me if everything was OK,” he said.

“I might add, it took them almost 30 seconds from the time the alarm went off to get to this location,” Hill added with a chuckle. “The response time was phenomenal.”

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