In less than a month, Oregon residents or visitors 21 or older will be free to grow, possess and consume marijuana.

What they won’t be able to do is buy it.

In keeping with Measure 91, the ballot measure approved by Oregon voters in the fall, marijuana becomes legal July 1. Person-to-person sales will remain illegal, and the system of retail dispensaries the Oregon Liquor Control Commission is developing is still about a year away.

Bend currently has 13 medical marijuana dispensaries where the holder of a state-issued card can obtain marijuana. All of the other cities in Central Oregon adopted moratoriums last spring allowing a one-year ban on medical dispensaries.

Those have since ended, with cities including Madras and La Pine limiting hours and areas the dispensaries can operate. So far, only one dispensary has opened in any of those communities — the Green Knottz dispensary opened in La Pine in mid-May. .

Tom Towslee, OLCC spokesman on marijuana issues, said the Oregon Legislature has considered the possibility that existing medical dispensaries could transition into functioning as recreational pot shops, but as of now, no changes to Measure 91 have been approved.

Towslee said the current rules for medical and recreational dispensaries vary slightly. While medical dispensaries are required to be 1,000 feet from a school and 1,000 feet from each other, the rule on recreational pot shops only requires they be 1,000 feet from a school.

The ballot measure approved last fall by voters provides that a city or county can ban recreational pot shops by a vote of the people in a general election, but it’s still a question whether a communitywide vote is the only way to ban dispensaries — the City Council of Cave Junction adopted a ban on medical dispensaries prior to last fall’s election, which was upheld by a judge but is on appeal to the Oregon Court of Appeals.

Bend City Councilor Victor Chudowsky is part of a council subgroup looking into what, if any, local rules ought to be put into place before the OLCC begins licensing recreational pot shops.

Chudowsky said while Measure 91 gave local governments the authority to regulate some aspects of recreational dispensary locations and operations, it’s premature for the subgroup to dig too deeply into the issue while the OLCC and the Legislature are still working out their own rules.

Other communities have jumped ahead and set up their own rules for both medical and recreational marijuana.

In Tualatin, all dispensaries must be at least 3,000 feet from residential areas, parks, schools and libraries, and butane extraction — a technique used to isolate marijuana’s active ingredients linked to multiple explosions and fires — has been banned.

In Tigard, dispensaries cannot be within 2,000 feet of another retail or wholesale marijuana facility, and drive-through service has been outlawed.

Both communities have set operating hours for dispensaries between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m.

If Bend is to implement any local rules concerning recreational pot shops, Chudowsky said, they will ideally be in place by the end of the year, before would-be dispensary operators start looking for locations.

Assuming no further local restrictions are adopted in Bend, the most likely location for recreational pot shops would appear to be along Third Street, in the corridor where most of the city’s 13 medical dispensaries have set up shop. The 1,000-feet-from-a-school rule puts nearly all of downtown off-limits and intrudes on many other commercially zoned parts of the city.

Towslee said while the specifics of how cities regulate the retail marijuana trade may end up varying widely and over-the-counter sales may be some time off, marijuana will be legal — within limits — in every corner of Oregon on July 1.

“That’s now the law in Oregon, thanks to what voters did last November,” Towslee said. “If someone is possessing a limited amount of marijuana in their home, or growing a limit of four plants on private property, and they’re doing this all out of public view, marijuana is now legal — sort of.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0387, shammers@bendbulletin.com

Editor’s note: This article has been corrected. An earlier version of the story misidentified the number of medical marijuana dispensaries outside Bend in Central Oregon.

The Bulletin regrets the error.