A cannabis buyers club was a members-only storefront that sold cannabis to seriously ill people, many of them living with AIDS, when doing so was a crime everywhere in the country. San Francisco's clubs, with activist Dennis Peron among their leaders, helped win California's 1996 medical marijuana law and gave later dispensaries their basic shape.
Why 4/20 is a good moment to look back at the activists
April 20 has become cannabis culture's unofficial holiday; our explainer on what 4/20 means covers where the date came from. It is also a fitting day to remember the people who took real legal risks so that buying cannabis could one day be ordinary.
What a buyers club was and how it operated outside the law
Buyers clubs sold cannabis openly to members who documented a serious illness. No license existed, so the clubs faced raids and lawsuits, and federal law treated all of it as illegal under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. Former members interviewed by researchers in 1996 described the clubs as an important source of emotional support.
Dennis Peron, the AIDS crisis and the San Francisco club
Dennis Peron served in the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam and became a gay rights and cannabis activist in San Francisco. The cause turned personal when his partner, Jonathan West, was dying of AIDS. In the early 1990s, Peron opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club, usually described as the country's first public medical cannabis dispensary. State narcotics agents raided and closed it in August 1996.
Another local figure, Mary Jane Rathbun, known as Brownie Mary, volunteered on San Francisco General Hospital's AIDS ward and baked cannabis brownies for people with AIDS. She was arrested three times. Our Pride Month history tells more of that LGBTQ+ activism story.
From a city ballot win to Proposition 215: the clubs go legal
On November 5, 1991, San Francisco voters passed Proposition P, a non-binding policy statement urging the state and the California Medical Association to restore "hemp medical preparations" to the list of available medicines. It won 136,492 votes to 35,732. In November 1996, Californians approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, which Peron helped write, by more than 5.3 million votes to about 4.3 million. Federal law did not change: more than a year later, the federal government sued to close six California clubs.
How buyers clubs became the template for medical dispensaries
Today's medical system still echoes the clubs. Proof of illness became a state medical card. Talking members through their options became the job of trained budtenders. The open storefront stayed, now with testing, labels and state licenses. A 1998 paper from San Francisco General Hospital's AIDS program described people with HIV getting cannabis from local clubs while researchers spent years seeking approval to study it.
Michigan's own path: the 2008 medical vote and the 2018 adult-use vote
Michigan voters approved the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act on November 4, 2008, creating the medical card program the Cannabis Regulatory Agency runs today. A decade later, voters approved adult use; the law took effect December 6, 2018, and the first licensed adult-use sales followed on December 1, 2019. Our Michigan cannabis laws page explains today's rules.
What the buyers club legacy means for shoppers today
The clubs worked in the shadows; licensed stores work in the open. At High Society, products come from trusted vendors and have passed Michigan's testing standards, and every sale starts with an ID check: adults 21 and older, or 18 and older with a Michigan medical card. Today's customers are a broad mix of adults, as our look at who uses cannabis shows. Find your nearest High Society store, and don't travel across state lines with cannabis.
