Queer activists helped build legal cannabis from the ground up. The industry should remember that history before respectability politics leaves it with no real allies.
Corporate Pride is retreating, even though the business case for supporting LGBTQ+ people has never been clearer. Queer consumers are loyal, vocal, culturally powerful, and connected to every taste-making industry on earth. GLAAD cites an estimate from LGBT Capital that LGBTQ consumers have $1.4 trillion in U.S. spending power. Brands know this. They are not confused about our community’s economic value. They are scared.
Scared of political retribution. Scared of being dragged before Congress. Scared of becoming the next target in a culture war they would rather not fight. Anheuser-Busch distanced itself after the backlash. Target scaled back its Pride collection. The cannabis industry should pay close attention to what happens next, because the same political forces coming for queer people also have cannabis in their sights.
Queer Cannabis History Was Forged in the AIDS Crisis
LGBTQ+ people helped lead the modern fight to legalize medical cannabis. During the AIDS crisis, when the federal government made it clear that it was content to watch our community die, queer activists in San Francisco treated cannabis as medicine because the institutions around them had failed.
Brownie Mary, born Mary Jane Rathbun, baked cannabis brownies for AIDS patients at San Francisco General Hospital. She was arrested for distributing cannabis and helped ignite a political fight the city could no longer ignore.
Dennis Peron lost his partner, Jonathan West, to AIDS and turned that grief into a movement. His work helped create Proposition 215, the 1996 Compassionate Use Act that made California the first state to broadly legalize medical cannabis.
Early access models such as the Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative were sustained by activists, including Paul Scott, who served on …
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Author: Wyatt Harms / High Times
