When AIDS struck San Francisco in 1981, as recounted in Clint Werner’s “Medical Marijuana and the AIDS Crisis,” the disease affected some of the city’s most prominent and noted gay rights activists, who became the first AIDS activists.93 In post-1960s San Francisco, cannabis remained plentiful and soon the word spread that smoking or eating cannabis often resulted in the “munchies,” which helped AIDS patients eat, reduced nausea, and resulted in weight gain. AIDS activists aligned with early medical cannabis activists to take on the U.S. government’s insistence that cannabis had no medicinal value. Volunteers like “Brownie Mary” Rathbun would visit the San Francisco General Hospital’s AIDS ward to distribute her homemade cannabis edibles to patients.

Dr. Donald Abrams, at the time the assistant director of the AIDS program at the hospital, saw firsthand how many of his patients benefited from using cannabis. In the early ’90s, Abrams began a seven-year battle to get U.S. government approval to conduct a study with medical cannabis. In 1998, Abrams received permission to conduct the first government-approved study on cannabis and HIV treatment.

By the time Abrams’s study was approved by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, 410,000 people had died of AIDS in the United States. California had formally embraced the medical marijuana movement with the 1996 passage of Proposition 215 legislation, authored by some the earliest medical cannabis activists, including Dennis Peron. Peron was the founder of San Francisco’s first cannabis buyers’ club, which he modeled upon the 1980s buyers’ clubs that imported promising drugs from overseas to fight AIDS.94