HIGHLY LIKELY

DENNIS PERON

(1946- 2018)

REMEMBERING THE LEGENDARY CANNABIS ACTIVIST

he modern medical Cannabis movement lost one of its greatest champions when Dennis Peron passed away. It’s safe to say that without his efforts, the current heyday we’re experiencing wouldn’t be possible. Peron worked tirelessly to normalize and legalize the plant.

Peron was born in New York, but after serving in the military, he attended San Francisco City College on the G.I. bill. On the side, he sold Cannabis.

Eventually, Cannabis became more than a hobby for Peron, who started to recognize the non-recreational benefits to the plant.

Around this time, he became friends with activists such as Harvey Milk, the future mayor of San Francisco, and longtime Cannabis advocate Jack Herer.

In the late 1970s he started selling Cannabis clandestinely in an actual storefront out of what was known as the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club. T PERON WAS A TRUE MEDICAL CANNABIS CRUSADER, A PERSON THAT FOUGHT FOR ITS

PALLIATIVE USAGE, SAYING THAT ALL WHO USED IT DID SO MEDICINALLY.

By 1991, he’d founded it as the first public Cannabis dispensary—all this at the height of the U.S. Drug War in California. Peron was a true medical Cannabis crusader, a person that fought for its palliative usage—and he did not accept any recreational value in Cannabis, saying that anyone using it was using it as medicine.

“They’re trying to shift it from medical to recreational. I personally don’t even know what ‘recreational’ marijuana is. There is no recreational marijuana. They made it up,” Peron said.

“What they’re trying to do is separate us by saying there’s people having fun and there’s people medicating. But people who use marijuana don’t get high, they get normal. The government is trying to say that people are getting high. They’re trying to demonize these people because they’re having fun.”

For Peron, the main medical reason his patients came to the club were symptoms related to AIDS. But over time, more patients with an array of other diseases joined the fold. Peron responded to the change he saw in the individuals he treated with a lifetime of activism—eventually culminating in a run for governor of California.

Soon after his Cannabis Buyers Club was closed by a state judge in 1998, Peron retired to a farm in the community of Clear Lake, just north of San Francisco. From there, until the end of his life, he grew—and gave away Cannabis to those in need of it for medicinal purposes.

Peron was an active opponent of Proposition 64— the legislation that legalized recreational use of Cannabis. He argued that it would hurt small farmers, in favor of big business.

“It’s a culture war. Marijuana has always been the symbol of our culture,” he said.

Some time after moving to the farm, Peron’s health started to deteriorate, likely due to the Agent Orange he was given in the Vietnam War. At age 72, he died of lung cancer in California on Jan. 27.

“No person is more responsible for the legalization of medical marijuana than Dennis,” Dale Gieringer, state coordinator of California National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) said. May he rest in peace.

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