THE QUEER HISTORY OF LEGAL
WEED

“A motley crew of queer caregivers, political activists, and staunch allies who subverted law, volunteered, were jailed and even died so that light could be shed on the life-saving qualities of cannabis.”

Untold histories are kind of my favorite thing, especially when there are queer people involved. World War II hero Alan Turing and civil rights legends Bayard Rustin and Billie Holiday are great examples; unsung heroes of history who have imprinted their personalities and deeds on popular consciousness, who also happen to be queer. The origins of these folk heroes are rebellious and intelligent and compassionate, hallmarks of our queer ideology.

So, it is my absolute delight to tell you that queer folk icons are found at the forefront of cannabis legalization as well and the weed you’re (hopefully) smoking at this moment, is made possible in-part thanks to the lives and work of queer people too. Dennis Peron, his late partner Jonathan West, Mary Jane Rathbun, Gilbert Baker and by association Robert Randall; A motley crew of queer caregivers, political activists, and staunch allies who subverted law, volunteered, were jailed and even died so that light could be shed on the life-saving qualities of cannabis.

Dennis Peron likely didn’t plan on being a folk hero when he smuggled home a few pounds of marijuana from Vietnam after being discharged from the military. Peron, often described as a “short, scrappy hippie,” was a quick convert to the stoner life. The New York Times reported in his 2018 obituary that Peron was, at one time, living in a commune and selling weed out of the second floor of a restaurant he opened. Photos of Peron often show him with a wide, cartoon-y smile, and almost always with a joint between his fingers or his lips.

“Dennis was an interesting character,” Clint Werner, a journalist and cannabis activist who knew Peron, said in a phone call. “I mean, he had a good humanitarian streak, but he was also really savvy.”

But while Peron was smoking weed recreationally, a viral underclass was using the controversial plant to prolong life.

denis peron

In the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, The Washington Post reported in 1990 that many patients liked to “die high.” As wasting took hold and their immune systems failed, one of the only things that succeeded in bringing back many patients’ appetites was cannabis. The Post reports that alongside the physical effects, the plant also brought some patients out of a state of depression.

“Marijuana seems to yank me out of those dark places your mind tends to go,” one man with AIDS told the Post. “It shines a new light on you and you realize things aren’t as bad as you think.”

The same year the Washington Post reported the phenomenon of AIDS patients smoking weed, Peron was arrested for marijuana possession in California. But the rub of it all was that the few ounces of weed that police found wasn’t Peron’s; it belonged to his then-partner, Jonathan West, who was in the throes of AIDS himself.

At the subsequent trial, the charges against Peron were dropped after West testified that the marijuana was his. A fortnight after the trial, West died and Peron found his cause célèbre: getting AIDS patients the weed they needed. A tough fight ahead of him, Peron had an unlikely ally in his fight, a 70-something grandmotherly woman with a penchant for baking particularly potent brownies.

Mary Jane Rathbun, like Peron, didn’t plan on being a folk hero, and she said that quite literally to the Chicago Tribune in 1993.

“I didn’t go into this thinking I would be a hero,” she told the Tribune from a public housing apartment in the Castro. “It was something I wanted to do to help my gay friends, and it just spiraled.”

The story goes that Rathbun, known for supplying weed-laced brownies to AIDS patients, was arrested one day in 1992 when police caught her in the middle of baking the brownies, flower and all. Faced with a sympathetic defendant, a judge sentenced her to 200 hours of community service, which she spent at AIDS support group the Shanti Project. Rathbun, also known as “Brownie Mary,” took her volunteering to the AIDS ward of San Francisco General Hospital, and there began dispensing her medicinal goodies to the patients.

The New York Times reported in her 1999 obituary that Rathbun was arrested two more times, but support for Brownie Mary saw those charges dropped.

During our interview, Clint Werner described fond memories with Rathbun, memories that also include a surprise character: Gilbert Baker, the creator of the earliest iteration of the gay pride flag. Baker, Werner says, was also a fervent marijuana activist — as was Harvey Milk before his historic election.

Werner says that rainbow flags remind him of when he used to “clean marijuana with Brownie Mary for AIDS patients, while the inventor of that flag, Gilbert Baker, would sit and roll joints for us to smoke.”

But Peron and Rathbun weren’t just armchair activists. Rathbun’s obituary states that the pair founded the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club in 1994, a first of its kind medical marijuana dispensary that initially focused solely on HIV/AIDS and cancer patients. As Werner told me, the operation eventually grew from a studio apartment to a five-story office building in downtown San Francisco. Baker, Wener said, had a workshop in the building making rainbow flags, and Peron had an entire floor as an office. Queer cannabis was queen here.

Peron and Rathbun also published a book, “Brownie Mary’s Marijuana Cookbook and Dennis Peron’s Recipe for Social Change,” which, while very influential, disappointingly did not contain Rathbun’s iconic brownie recipe.

Most notable of their efforts, Peron helped author Proposition P, which advised the state of California and the state medical association to return hemp medical preparations to the medicines available in the state, as well as Proposition 215, which, in 1996, allowed medical cannabis use in the state, becoming the first medical marijuana ballot initiative passed in the U.S. at the state level.

But unbeknownst to many, alongside Peron’s legislative efforts, AIDS patients had been feuding for years with the federal government over access to it’s cache of marijuana.

MARY JANE RATHBURN / “BROWNIE MARY”

Most people would be shocked to learn that the federal government used to dispense medical marijuana. But because the history of the program is so intrinsically linked to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country, it’s not a surprise that there’s little writing about it. In fact, Clint Werner's 2001 paper for the Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics is the most comprehensive history I could find.

When Robert Randall first heard about the benefits of cannabis for AIDS patients in 1983, as Werner wrote in the paper, he was already deeply entrenched in the world of medical marijuana. Like Peron’s late-partner West and Brownie Mary’s patients, Randall used marijuana to ease symptoms; not related to AIDS, but to glaucoma. But Randall was far from the typical medical cannabis user.

Randall became a household name among cannabis connoisseurs after a federal court ruled, in 1976, that his use of the plant to treat his glaucoma was a medical necessity, effectively launching the medical marijuana movement. The Drug Policy Alliance states that that same year, Randall became the first American to obtain legal medical access to the government’s supply of marijuana. Randall’s supply of the drug continued unabated for decades, interrupted briefly in 1978. The Drug Policy Alliance states that a related lawsuit forced the federal government to launch the Compassionate Investigational New Drug program in order to supply Randall with said medically necessary marijuana. The DPA states that the Compassionate IND program served as the basis for a similar program that allowed AIDS patients access to unapproved drugs like AZT, a failed treatment for cancer that became the first FDA-approved drug to treat HIV/AIDS.

And amid a fight at the Drug Enforcement Administration over how marijuana was classified by the agency, Werner’s paper states that Randall was contacted by a man facing jail time in Texas for possession of marijuana. The man, only known as Steve L., had been using marijuana to reverse his AIDS-related wasting. After what Werner called “months of wrangling with evasive agencies,” Steve L. was approved to join the Compassionate IND program. In fact, according to Werner, Steve L. became the first AIDS patient to get medical marijuana from the government on the same day Dennis Peron was arrested in 1990.

Steve L.’s supply of weed reached him a little more than two weeks before he died.

An obituary in High Times magazine, which included contact information for a Randall-founded nonprofit called the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics, would prove to be an important resource for one couple dying of AIDS. And like many in this story, their circumstances were far from typical, particularly because they were straight.

The name Ryan White became a household name in 1985 when White, a 13-year-old boy who contracted HIV from an infusion to treat his severe hemophilia, was denied readmission at his Indiana middle school. White’s story and subsequent death five years later helped shatter misconceptions that HIV/AIDS was exclusive to permiscusous gay men.

And like White’s innocent image that helped propel AIDS legislation, the All-American image of Kenny and Barbara Jenks was instrumental to the cause for AIDS patients’ access to medical marijuana.

Kenny Jenks was a hemophiliac who, like White, contracted HIV through an infusion. But unlike the teenage White, Jenks was married and transmitted the virus to his wife, Barbra, his high school sweetheart. After contacting Randall through Steve L.’s obituary seeking access to the IND program, the seemingly everyday couple soon became posterchildren for the movement, helping to launch the Marijuana/AIDS Research Service to assist AIDS patients and their doctors in applying to the program.

“What he did was he took their applications and turned them into a fill-in-the-blank submission form, and he sent out templates to every AIDS organization in the country,” Werner said. “And anyone who contacted them, he sent them this form, and they and their doctor could sit down and fill it in and it would be simple and easy.”

But that’s where the federal government’s good will ran out. Werner says that the government, faced with an influx of AIDS patients seeking marijuana—a confluence of two communities that I hope popped a blood vessel in Ronald Reagan’s eye—shut the program down abruptly in June 1991.

“They didn't say, ‘Okay, quick, let's kick up production and do what we can to help these people,’” Werner said. “What they said was, ‘stop the program.’”

Werner’s 2001 paper details the subsequent public relations nightmare and media blitz, which even roped in activist powerhouses at ACT UP, that forced the government to suspend its decision to close the program until the conflict with AIDS patients was resolved.

Werner says the parties also sparred over whether patients should receive marijuana or a synthetic known as dronabinol or marinol. But the synthetic was a far cry from the real thing, and did little to even address the symptoms for which patients took the drug.

“It was awful,” Werner said. “It was like eating a bath oil bead. First of all, it came on really harsh, [the] psychoactive properties. It didn't trigger appetite very well at all in most people. Hardly any really found any benefit from it. I don't remember meeting anyone who liked it.”

The Health and Human Services Secretary at the time, Louis Sullivan, eventually settled the dispute in 1992. According to Werner, patients who had been already supplied with marijuana would enjoy continued access, while approved applicants who had not yet received their supply, mostly AIDS patients, would be given the synthetic.

Barbra Jenks died in 1992, according to Kenny’s 1993 obituary in the New York Times. The paper described him as “the nation’s last surviving AIDS patient with government permission to smoke marijuana.” He was 31.

The fervor of the outcry over the IND program closure was instrumental to the success of Peron’s Prop P, which soon after passed by an overwhelming majority.

The passage also spurred scientific interest in the benefits of cannabis on AIDS patients. But that, too, was no easy task.

CLINT WERNer

Dr. Donald Abrams, Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, remembers having to get creative to study marijuana’s benefits in the early 1990s.

Abrams, one of the first oncologists in SF General’s AIDS Ward who also happens to be married to Clint Werner, applied in 1994 for a supply of cannabis from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. NIDA was the only entity that could supply the cannabis for a trial that had already been reviewed by hospitals, universities, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But after nine months of silence, Abrams’ request was summarily denied. The roadblock was, effectively, NIDA itself.

“When I finally met with [former NIDA director] Alan Leshner in January of ‘97, he told me that ‘we are the National Institute on Drug Abuse, not for drug abuse,’ and that they have a congressional mandate to only study substance abuse as substances of abuse, and not as therapeutic agents,” Abrams told me.

Werner writes that the agency’s director eventually passed the buck to the National Institutes of Health, and agreed to supply marijuana to any study that passed peer review by the nation’s medical research agency.

But at NIH, Abrams’ roadblocks continued, this time due to bias against the drug itself. It was only until his third attempt, when he and his fellow researchers planned a trial to study how marijuana could potentially interfere with protease inhibitors, a class of antiviral drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS, that he was successful.

Approval came soon after, and initial findings from the 21-day study conducted in 1998 found that, as long believed and understood by AIDS patients and their caregivers, marijuana and dronabinol led to “significant increase in caloric intake and weight.” There was now scientific, peer-reviewed, government-backed research that proved the benefits of marijuana on AIDS patients, adding another nail to the coffin on efforts to prohibit the drug.

But again, Abrams said, he faced roadblocks in publishing his research.

“It was rejected by the New England Journal of Medicine, by The Lancet, and by the Journal of the American Medical Association,” Abrams said. He said Annals of Internal Medicine also rejected his paper even after writing a feature on his study previously. It was only after appealing to their prior work that Abrams said he was able to get his paper published in the journal.

“It's never easy to get results of a cannabis trial published in conventional medical literature,” he said. “That's why it's nice that we have a few cannabis journals now.”

Now, as even recreational marijuana becomes commonplace, it’s easy to see how this history could get lost. But there are those who try to tell this forgotten story. In the case of Dennis Peron, it’s the man who survived the late folk hero, his husband, John Entwistle Jr.

Entwistle currently maintains the Dennis Peron Legacy Project, which aims to celebrate Peron’s life and his work on behalf of AIDS patients and pot smokers. The debut of a forthcoming documentary about Peron, entitled “Dennis: The Man Who Legalized Cannabis,” is on hold due to the ongoing pandemic, but the 20-minute film can be viewed on YouTube.

rOBERT c. Randall

As queer people, we have at least a fundamental understanding that our history has long been hidden, that the Stonewall Riots were not the birth of queerness or of our liberation, that some of the queerness of some of history’s greatest actors has been erased. Our contributions to the world are minimized or outright ignored.

So when you pack your bowl, roll your joint, or most importantly, when you take a bite of a brownie, remember the folks that came before; when both the people and pot we love were even more revolutionary; when the drug was more than just a post-work comedown, but a way to prolong life.

Remember the Brownie Mary’s of the world, the people who did whatever they could to help, no matter the consequence. And remember people like Dennis Peron, who fought to make the world better for the people coming after. Remember what we did, and what we are capable of.