Thirty years ago this fall, a group of queer activists in San Francisco legalized cannabis as medicine in California. It was the first law like it anywhere in the world and it existed because people were dying of AIDS and nobody in the federal government was helping.

Brownie Mary was in her seventies when she started baking cannabis brownies and delivering them to patients at SF General. She got arrested for it, twice, and came back both times. Dennis Peron was grieving his partner and turned that grief into a ballot initiative. These are the people Prop 215 came from.

The dispensary you walk into, the jar you pick up, the budtender who asks what you're looking for — none of that exists without Ward 86 at SF General, without the AIDS crisis, without a community that medicated itself through an epidemic because Washington had decided to look away.

Cannabis got normalized and the people who normalized it mostly didn't get rich off it. Licensing fees, criminal records, and capital requirements locked out huge portions of the communities that fought hardest for legalization. Less than 5% of cannabis businesses are Black-owned today, for example.

In California, queer history and cannabis history are the same history. They share the same city, the same decade, the same people. This June, thirty years on, we think that's worth saying out loud and repeating, especially as long as this plant is criminalized .

We're Miss Grass, we're a California brand, and we exist because of Prop 215. This is our history too, and we think you should know it. 

• 30th anniversary of Prop 215 this fall — first medical cannabis law anywhere in the world

• Born directly out of the AIDS crisis and SF's queer activist community

• Brownie Mary + Dennis Peron as the human center of the story

• Ward 86 at SF General — first dedicated AIDS outpatient clinic in the country, 1983

• Federal government wasn't helping; cannabis was one of the few things that was

• Prop 215 passed November 1996, 55.6% of the vote

• The legal industry that exists today traces directly back to that moment

• The people who built it have largely been locked out of it — licensing costs, criminal records, capital barriers

• Less than 5% of cannabis businesses are Black-owned

• Pride month as the right moment to name this explicitly rather than let the anniversary pass quietly

• Miss Grass as a California brand with a direct line to this history

• All Times tie-in: the everyday flower, no performance required, made for the person who just needs to exist in their body comfortably
  
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