Justice  /  Oral History

From Drug War to Dispensaries

An oral history of weed legalization’s first wave in the 1990s.
Rena Macura/Associated Press

Ethan Nadelmann, legalization activist and founder of the Drug Policy Alliance: What you’ve got to remember is that in the mid-’80s and into the early ’90s, the Drug War catapults into the American imagination at a hysterical pitch. There are presidential speeches, the New York Times has a special editor on it, two or three times a year the major news magazines are putting the Drug War on their covers. I refer to this stage as McCarthyism on steroids. It doesn’t really drop off until the first Gulf War. It’s almost as if the first Gulf War comes along and people are like, “Okay, America has a real war again.”

Dale Gieringer, director of California NORML and co-author of Prop 215: The legalization movement pretty much died out in 1980 when Reagan came to power. Things got worse and worse, and it was at its nadir in 1991. But ’91 was also when the medical marijuana movement started, when Dennis Peron (who died in January of this year) and a bunch of his comrades put Proposition P on the San Francisco ballot. It declared that San Francisco was in favor of medical marijuana. It was symbolic because it was just a city initiative. But it was the first victory the marijuana reform movement had scored since the 1970s.

It was an incredibly hostile environment at that time, but Dennis was in a unique situation. He was a longtime pot dealer and gay-rights activist. Back in the ’70s, he had a restaurant called the Big Top in the Castro, where he was basically selling pot publicly. This wasn’t medical, they were just selling pot. So in 1978, Dennis gets Prop W on the San Francisco ballot, which declared the DA and the cops should not enforce the marijuana laws. It passed and Dennis was looking to Mayor Moscone to open it up more. Dennis was planning to go full steam ahead with the Big Top. But then Moscone and Harvey Milk were assassinated. Dianne Feinstein became mayor and put the kibosh on the whole thing. The whole tone of the city changed and the Big Top got shut down.

So Dennis went underground and then the ’80s came along, and Reagan, and the escalating Drug War. But in 1991, the conversation surrounding marijuana legalization changed with the AIDS epidemic. There was widespread medical use of marijuana by AIDS patients suffering from wasting syndrome and other AIDS-related illnesses. Dennis saw that and knew there was a lot of support for medical marijuana used by AIDS sufferers. Prop P passes in ’91 with 80 percent and Dennis opens up the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers’ Club and starts openly selling medical marijuana to medical users. Sure enough, San Francisco cops and the whole San Francisco establishment respected Dennis’s club.