A perfect storm led to 1st MedMj law, I know, I was there

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If the pharmaceutical industry had found a way to treat AIDS just two years earlier, we would not have legal marijuana today. Here is what happened. 

In the late 1980s AIDS activists learned THC keeps patients alive, so arranged with law enforcement to make marijuana use the lowest priority crime in San Francisco. By 1994, they had a thriving cannabis buyers club in SF that was only open from eleven to one, because during those hours there are less police officers on duty than any other time of day. So any crime, ANYTHING was more important than busting someone for weed, and with so many cops off duty from 11 to 1:00, they would just not bust anyone for marijuana.  Then as people realized, drug related crime does not go up when people have legal access to cannabis, and no one goes from weed to heroin, a tolerance developed, and the movement began. 

So medical marijuana first became legal in San Francisco by just bending the law a bit, and today with $5 Million in tax revenue in one state from just one quarter of legal cannabis, it will probably soon be legal everywhere 

Read the Colorado Marijuana Tax Report: March 2014, here:

http://www.celebstoner.com/news/marijuana-news/2014/05/09/colorado-marijuana-tax-report-1st-quarter-2014/

So the plant that takes the grumpy out of grumpy old men will likely be available everywhere in the USA in no time. 

A Perfect Storm.

It took a perfect storm and crafty grassroots activism to get that first law passed in 1995. I watched it happen, I was there.  And recently I realized I should write that story, and Chill Hippie Blog seems like the best place to tell it. 

Recently at Kinetic Brewery here in Lancaster where I live now, a friend said she thinks the people downstairs are using marijuana because she can smell the smoke coming from their window and I said, “Oh see well I don't exhale.”

“Huh?”

“It's too expensive. So I just take in as much as I need, hold it until the smoke is gone, and then exhale.  I mean, why blow out the smoke?  I don't want to get the birds stoned.”

“Get the birds stoned?” everyone at the table laughed, but I was serious. 

I said, “You know how Bill Clinton said he never inhaled, well I never exhale.”

And again, they all burst out laughing.  I said, “I was in San Francisco in 1995 when this all went down and I worked on the law,” and several of them high fived me, so I decided to write about that period, because I don't think anyone else is, and it's history, it should be documented.

Marijuana is finally on its way to being legal everywhere because of the AIDS epidemic. 

It was a perfect storm. 

People in the 1980s were dying of AIDS and there was no treatment, let alone a cure.  It was not the virus itself that would kill them.  They were dying from Wasting, which is when a person is so sick they can’t eat so it's the starvation that actually kills them. 

People with AIDS were dying because they could not eat.

In San Francisco, one male gave his ailing lover a toke of marijuana and right then the dying man got up and ate.  And started getting healthier.

And the medical marijuana movement began. 

Crafty Political Activists 

I met Dennis Peron, the man who gave his lover marijuana and started the legal marijuana movement, a few times, and I think he should remember me.  I'm the lady who wrote the LTE that ran in the Examiner, or was it the Chronicle, with the headline “Peron is the only Real Republican in the race.”  Peron ran for Governor that year along with running the medical marijuana campaign, I think he was using one to garner strength for the other, he was stragezing all the time, Dennis, really smart.

Peron, Google images

The day my LTE ran in the paper, I came into the buyers club and Peron said to me with genuine appreciation, “Wow, the real Republican, wow, I like that.” 

My argument in the letter was my usual bi-partisan stuff.  I guess because I never could be bisexual, I get my kicks going both ways in politics, left and right. . .

My letter said that with medical marijuana we were creating a new industry, supplying a demand, so actually practicing a pure and genuine capitalism.  Medical marijuana is the free market in action, I argued, something like that.  Anyway.  I think I brought in a few Republican votes for both Dennis and the medical marijuana issue by pointing that out, so, I mean, I can legitimately say I helped get the first Compassionate Use law passed, even though I was never part of that inner circle of guys who surrounded Dennis. 

I wanted to be, but I think I freaked them out when I showed up in 1995 at the original Buyers Club on Church Street out of the blue. 

It was in the Castro District, an apartment thick with smoke and men, mostly gay men with AIDS.  Some women were there too, like me, and other patients with illnesses that can be treated with weed.  But the dominant disease present was AIDS.

I use it for PTSD.  

When I arrived in San Francisco in 1995 I had just discovered how much marijuana helps me with my mystery disease.  Today it's 2014 and I still don't have a diagnosis, so I still have to figure things out for myself.  

Back in 1994, I was on my couch, hadn’t gone out for weeks, it was one of those long pain flares where I could barely walk, I get them still all the time.  That day a friend showed up with a joint of Humboldt County green, and even though I had been clean and sober for more than two years, when he said, oh come on, take a puff, I said, why not.

And inhaled.

A few minutes later, before I even realized it, I was up moving around.  I took a couple puffs, a commercial came on with music, and before I knew it, I was standing up and kinda stretching and moving to the music and then I went –

What?  I'm moving. I'm dancing!

The weed did this thing, it smushed out over my body, it went EVERYWHERE the pain was and just massaged it away.  Now I know that eighty percent of that could have been the endorphins, but so what.  It worked, I was up off the couch.

I started a new medical treatment right then, to use medical marijuana every chance I got.  To this day, I smoke and stretch to music and, well, I'm still sick, but I'm in much better shape than I was back then. 

The Very First Buyers Club

The buyers club had been in the Castro District awhile when I first got to SF in 1995, and met all these guys who I really wanted to get to know better.  But they were all gay men, and they did not even seem to see me.  

Their reticence with me may have been because I showed up out of the blue, no one knew who I was, and they were doing this kind of illegal thing, I'm sure.  They might have even thought I was a cop, I don't know. 

Just weeks after I started going to the Church St. Club to get my weed quasi-legally, they moved the operation to a four story building on Market Street.

A Four Story Building On Market St.
And It was Not Even Legal Yet
(I Love San Francisco)

Right there on Market Street two blocks from the Civic Center people lined up, entered, bought weed, exited, all under the eyes of the SFPD, in broad daylight and nobody got arrested, and the law had only just gotten on the ballot, you could not do that anywhere else in the state.  That's why I love San Francisco, man I miss San Francisco, not The City the way it is today, but the way it used to be, sigh.

The buyers club in 1995 took up an entire four story building in downtown San Francisco, an entire office building dedicated to getting medical marijuana to sick people. 

Thousands of people came through during those hours of 11 to 1 every weekday, and they all spent hundreds of dollars.  Plus you could hang out and smoke your medicine in a salon area after your purchase.  One can only imagine how much money they were bringing in each day, and how much got carried out.   

When you arrived at the buyers club on Market Street, you saw police cars everywhere, parked outside, across the street, driving by.  Cops grinned and leaned on their patrol cars, nodding hello to people like me who were regular customers.  The cops were there to protect us, the marijuana buyers.  Not to arrest us, to protect us.  That was so cool and necessary, because believe me, when those sick guys weak with AIDS walked out of the building with a bag of four hundred dollar weed to get on the Muni and ride home, there were thugs on the street wanting to mug them. 

The SFPD protected the patients at the buyers club.  And some of us came every day, to fraternize with other sick people, and brainstorm ways to get the law passed. 

Once you entered the building, you only stopped on the first floor on your first trip, where they verified with your doctor that you do indeed have one of the specific illnesses that respondd to medical marijuana.  In my case it's PTSD from being a sex crime victim and chronic 24-hour a day total body pain.  Weed helps me to deal with the triggers, and to not mind the pain.

On the second floor of the building were offices. That's where I tried to get Dennis Peron to notice me.  I’d drop in to remind him who I was, I'm the one who got the letter in the paper today, but then a younger man would walk in the room and Peron would forget I was there. 

The second floor was where I wanted to be because that's where they were running the campaign for medical marijuana with the Compassionate Use Act, which became law January 1996.   

On the third floor of the buyers club you bought cheap weed, the stuff from Mexico and Texas.  On the fourth floor it was paradise, the new hybrids being created by stoned botanists who’d been working on marijuana cultivation since the 1960s.  The fourth floor was the location of the $90 an eighth stuff that all of us somehow found the money to buy.

I really believe by using the more potent weed I'm preventing damage to my lungs, because I don't smoke as much with the potent weed.  One puff keeps me relieved for two to three hours, then I take another puff.  I'm sure MedMJ is not good for my lungs, but it's not as bad for me as most the pharmaceuticals doctors peddle today.  When I use cannabis, I feel like I'm taking charge of my own health care. 

The police were there outside the Buyers Club in San Francisco to protect the patients so they could take their marijuana home and feel better. 

And at the end of the day I'm sure someone from the SFPD walked out of the building with a briefcase full of cash, it was, I think, part of the agreement the buyers club had with the police

A Perfect Storm w/Pharma  

It took bags of cash and people dying of AIDS to get the first marijuana legalization law passed. 

It was a perfect storm.  People were dying of AIDS and there was no treatment or cure, when in San Francisco one man fed his sick lover a marijuana filled brownie and the dying man suddenly got up and got back his appetite.  Word spread through the Castro district and soon it became real clear that weed was saving people’s lives.  If the medical world had discovered the “cocktail” of drugs used today to treat AIDS just two years earlier, the sequence of events that led to the first law to legalize medical marijuana would not have taken place. 

Also since it was San Francisco, a level of benevolent corruption drove the politics forward.  As the pounds were processed through the buyers club, I have a feeling a lot of cops ended up with wads of cash. 

I think. 

I don't know for sure about the briefcases full of cash, but I know cash is how other things get done in San Francisco.  When I was moving away and needed a No Parking sign in front of my building for a moving van for a few hours, I called the local precinct and they informed me:  You bring an envelope with a specific amount of cash and a name on it to a police station, no piece of paper saying what the money is for, just hand it to the guy at the front desk, and go home. Then at the requested time, in front of your building, appears a No Parking sign.

Sometimes I really miss San Francisco.

-Kay Ebeling

Cut Paragraph, about being invisible around gay men:

That's the only thing I don't like about gay men, the way I feel invisible around them.  Especially this one guy who I’d see at the club.  He’d come over from Berkeley or Oakland, and since I was a kid, it seemed the smartest people in the state were from Berkeley and Oakland, and so I revered them. He looked SO INTERESTING with creases on his face that showed extreme intelligence.  He reminded me of Timothy Leary, because of the depth and wisdom he emanated.  I wanted to get to know him and kept trying to find a way to initiate conversation with him, but it was like I just wasn’t there. 

Another Cut Paragraph:
I use medical marijuana every day, because since doctors can’t figure out what's wrong with me, they're not going to write a prescription for the pain, they probably think I'm making it up to get drugs.  So medical marijuana is the only medicine I can get.  The Green Medics here in Lancaster don't question whether I really need it or not, they just deliver.