Thirty years after Prop 215, the California State Fair crowned its first home-grow champion and hung medals on the people who made growing legal in the first place. Some of them had been arrested for it.
The question came from the stage, and hands went up across the room.
“How many in this audience were arrested for medical marijuana?”
The man asking was Dale Gieringer, director of California NORML and a co-author of the Compassionate Use Act. He was speaking at the California Cannabis Awards, held on the grounds of the California State Fair. And the people raising their hands were about to be given medals in front of a state seal.
That is the whole story of the night, and arguably of the last thirty years, compressed into one show of hands.
Thirty Years Since 215
Bonnie Metcalf. Photo by Matt Adams
The fifth annual California Cannabis Awards handed out its Golden Bear trophies in Sacramento this month, part of the California Cannabis Experience at a State Fair that runs through August 7. Cannabis sits there alongside the wine, the cheese and the olive oil. That alone would have been unthinkable in 1996.
This is why the organizers gave this year’s Pebbles Trippet Lifetime Achievement Award to a crowd instead of a person.
The award is named for Pebbles Trippet, the activist behind the Trippet Standard, the California legal precedent that established a medical patient’s right to transport cannabis. She received the first one. This year, on the thirtieth anniversary of Proposition 215, it went collectively to the activists who put the initiative on the ballot and passed it. California NORML recommended the list of medal recipients. Several dozen showed up to collect theirs. More than three hundred additional names scrolled on screen.
Gieringer spoke for the group. In prepared remarks, he …
Read More
Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
