How gay rights advocacy gave rise to the marijuana movement

Written By Emily Gray Brosious

 

(Photo credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

The medical marijuana movement probably wouldn’t have happened without San Francisco’s gay rights movement.

Marijuana policy reform and gay rights may at first appear to operate in entirely separate advocacy spheres in the United States, but the two movements actually share a deep common bond.

In fact, the medical marijuana movement, which generally gave rise to the larger marijuana legalization movement, stems directly out of the gay rights movement. In a way, gay advocacy gave birth to cannabis advocacy.

“It’s really very simple,” writes SF Weekly reporter Chris Roberts. “Legal marijuana doesn’t happen without the AIDS epidemic.”

San Francisco, 1990s

When HIV/AIDS began surging in the 1980s and 1990s, a positive diagnosis was a veritable death sentence. Scientists didn’t understand the virus, there were no antiretroviral drugs, no medical help and no relief for suffering patients.

The gay community was hit particularly hard. Many people — mostly young men — suffered painful, agonizing deaths from HIV/AIDS during this time. Marijuana, as many users will know, eased that pain and suffering.

“The medical marijuana movement really started out of the gay rights movement,” United For Care campaign manager Ben Pollara told Watermark Online. “One of the first campaigns to really run on this issue in California in 1996 was started, at least in part, by a guy who lost his partner to AIDS and used marijuana in his last days to try to give him a better quality of life.”

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Along with death, real outrages were also required. A San Francisco police narc squad had to seize a 4-ounce stash of marijuana that a longtime San Francisco cannabis dealer named Dennis Peron had set aside for his dying partner. To acquit Peron, his partner, Jonathan West, had to drag his withered body into court to testify that the cannabis was his. It was one of West’s last acts on earth before he died two weeks later.

That scene led San Francisco voters to approve a medical marijuana initiative, Proposition P, in November 1991, which — after Peron became even more open about giving marijuana to anyone who needed it — led to the action (and inaction) in the state Legislature that preceded the passage of Proposition 215, the country’s first law allowing medical cannabis, in 1996.