The Pride of Cannabis

At Breeze Botanicals, we take great pride in offering a wide array of clean, local cannabis and cannabis-derived products to help our clients feel empowered in their own healing. To purchase requires only a state approved ID, cash, and an openness to experience the many healing, soothing properties of the beautiful plant. It’s beautiful to be able to do this, and we can with great thanks to gay activist Dennis Peron.
“Mr. Peron was a driving force behind a San Francisco ordinance allowing medical marijuana — a move that later aided the 1996 passage of Proposition 215 that legalized medical use in the state.” Because of this precedent, we can buy cannabis in an ever growing number of states in the U.S. And while there remains much to improve upon in the cannabis industry (lack of diversity, the exceptionally stringent tracking, the exorbitant taxes), aren’t we grateful to be here now?

After serving in the military during the Vietnam War, and moved by his experiences there, Dennis Peron returned home determined to make change in the world. Rather than continue adhering to rigid expectations of what it means to be a man in America, Peron became a “dirty hippie”, a qualifier he embraced, and acted with others to make cannabis legal (again). But then, AIDS (Acquired Immune Difficiency Syndrome) began stealing the lives of gay men at alarming numbers. Due to the stigma and legal discrimination visited upon the queer community, not much was done to help those slowly melting away in pain. Peron saw his friends and loved ones dying and knew cannabis could help them manage pain, stimulate appetite, and maybe lift their spirits, to create space for joy or understanding. He fought for them, for his community, for the community at large.

And it was a dangerous fight. "In 1994, Peron co-founded, along with Brownie Mary and several others, San Francisco's Cannabis Buyers Club, the first public medical cannabis dispensary in the U.S." It was not fancy. It didn’t have a menu. And it operated under constant threat. The establishment was raided multiple times and Peron was once shot by police. But he persisted. They all persisted. Many people, when speaking of the relationship between cannabis and the LGBTQI+ communities,
cite the criminalization of each as the commonality. However, the right to decide what we do with our bodies, what we use as medicine, to live our lives freely, is what brings the cannabis and queer communites together. The communities overlap in the most wondrous of ways.

Happy Pride!

Resources:
https://www.civilized.life/articles/make-cannabis-queer-again-inside-the-birthplace-of-the-legal-marijuana-movement/
https://weedmaps.com/news/2020/05/meet-dennis-peron-the-father-of-medical-marijuana/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/lgbtq-pride-marijuana-industry-cannabis-852041/

---