Thirty years ago, growing, possessing, or selling marijuana was totally illegal in America and most other countries.
Polling showed that the vast majority of Americans opposed marijuana legalization. Many American states, especially the most right-wing like Oklahoma and Texas, had life imprisonment and even death penalty for some marijuana crimes. Federal law also had draconian penalties, and the “war on drugs” was a real war with hundreds of thousands of casualties.
For decades, close to a million Americans were arrested for marijuana every year, most of them for simple possession. Each arrest caused hardship, monetary loss, and often caused incarceration.
So how did it happen that today cannabis is legal in Canada, and is mostly or partially legal in nearly half of all American states?
The answer is very useful for progressives and Democrats who wonder how to achieve radical political change.
As a black market marijuana grower, legalization activist, and contributor to the online cultivation magazine Growing Marijuana Perfectly, I want to explain how we so radically changed public and political opinion about marijuana. These tactics can be applied to all ethical causes.
Be Willing to Make the Ultimate Sacrifice
Marijuana growing and selling was a dangerous, revolutionary act from 1937 (when general cannabis prohibition was written into US law) until only recently. We saw ourselves as freedom fighters refusing to submit to a government that believed it could tell us which plants to grow.
Black market growers and sellers supplied the entire world’s cannabis-consuming population, including people who visited Holland’s cannabis “coffeeshops.” The Dutch had not legalized cannabis production, and the coffeeshops bought their supply from the black market.
In America, the drug war was a real war, especially where I lived in Northern California’s Emerald Triangle cannabis growing region. Every year they’d come in with military hardware, personnel, and tactics, besieging our communities like the helicopter boys did in Apocalypse Now.
Many of us armed ourselves and decided to fight fire with fire. Some of us were killed or wounded. Many others were sent to state or federal prison for sentences longer than those given to murderers and rapists. Families were destroyed, land and other assets seized via civil forfeiture.
Stoner conversations were about whether we’d surrender or fight to the death. We decided to fight to the death. We would keep on growing and selling no matter what the police and DEA did. And for every plant they cut down, we grew two more.
A perfect example of being willing to make the ultimate sacrifice is seen in the story of Dennis Peron, often described as the “Father of Marijuana Legalization.”
Peron was a Vietnam veteran who found that cannabis helped him and others deal with the horrors he’d experienced in war, and as a gay man in America thirty years ago.
He told me he didn’t care if the cops killed him, he said, he was going to keep on providing marijuana to veterans, people with HIV and other serious illnesses.
San Francisco police shot Peron during a cannabis raid and arrested his partner, who was dying of AIDS, which accelerated the man’s death.
Peron was so angry that he decided that if they wanted a war he’d give them a war. He opened a marijuana buyer’s club in the Castro, got busted repeatedly, said “f off” to the cops and judges.
Then he opened a huge five-story marijuana club on Market Street in the heart of San Fran’s vaunted financial district.
From day one, the lines were out the door and around the block. The club sold hundreds of pounds of high-grade cannabis per week, and Peron gave away the same amount to indigent veterans, AIDS patients, and others in need.
At the same time, he ran for governor, gleefully exposing the corruption and lies of California politicians while being repeatedly raided and threatened with prison.
But his most impactful political strategy was to pay for and place the Proposition 215 medical marijuana legalization ballot initiative on California’s 1996 ballot. It passed by a wide margin.
Law enforcement, prison guard unions, drug war liars went crazy trying to scuttle Prop. 215, but it took hold, becoming the genesis of all the marijuana legalization that has followed.
As Peron explained:
“The main thing is show them you’re not afraid to take them on physically, economically, and politically. You refuse to accept their authority. If they injure, kill, or jail you, it’s an honor. Just like the many people who got beaten, killed or jailed with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Civil Rights movement. If you aren’t willing to put your life on the line to create change, you will fail.”
Get In Their Face
Whether it’s SCOTUS sold out to billionaires, women’s rights trampled, traitors who work for Putin and his puppet Trump, or whatever cause is most important to you, identify those who are running the war against you and directly confront them to their face.
In Northern California, for example, there were narks (undercover police officers and paid informants) operating at Humboldt State University to bust marijuana growers and users. We took pictures of these snitches and put them on bulletin boards and otherwise circulated them.
Pretty soon, narks were being surrounded by hostile people when they went out in Arcata and elsewhere. We told them they were no better than Nazi collaborators and gestapo. People threatened them and in some cases there were actual fights.
The tactic worked, not just because their cover was blown, but because the narks became afraid of us. It was so rewarding when we later saw documents showing law enforcement pulled their snitches and undercovers off campus because they feared the marijuana community!
Imagine if SCOTUS feared us that way, or if the January 6th traitors were harshly confronted every time they showed their faces, to the degree that they became afraid of progressives and liberals.
Identify & Attack Webs of Evil
When we got serious about ending the war on cannabis, we had to go after the vast web of evil that supported it.
This included the pharma and alcohol industries. It included all who benefit from cannabis prohibition, such as prison guards, police, drug testers, drug treatment, probation officers, corporate prisons, and the media.
It also includes prohibitionist politicians, some of whom are still in office today, who want people jailed for growing, possessing, or selling marijuana.
Once we identified these entities we went to work boycotting, protesting, disrupting, confronting.
The goal is to make it extremely uncomfortable and financially painful for people to do fascist things like tell you what plants you can grow and enjoy.
Win in the Media and Public Opinion
Peron repeatedly said that words and politics alone don’t achieve major social change, they have to be backed up by strong people willing to risk everything for freedom.
That being said, he was extremely savvy about opinion management. During his campaign to get Prop. 215 passed, he brought AIDS patients, disabled veterans, and other medical marijuana users to press conferences.
Images of sick and dying people who’d tried all the pharma drugs and doctor’s tactics with no good effect, who then were able to get out of their wheelchairs and dance happily after a few tokes from a joint were extremely effective.
Peron always made sure to put on an exciting show for media, knowing they love spectacle more than anything else.
By openly appearing on camera in massive marijuana farms and being shown purchasing wholesale cannabis carried in duffel bags by Emerald Triangle growers, he offered media scintillating content, which translated into very favorable coverage.
He allowed media to embed at his cannabis headquarters during raids, and encouraged growers who’d been raided to tell media what police did to them, which often included police officers sexually assaulting females, stealing assets, terrorizing children, and needless gunplay and other violence during marijuana raids.
As with what happened to public sentiment when media showed Vietnam War carnage every night on network news, when the public saw that the war on marijuana was a hot war with real casualties, they turned against the police and marijuana prohibition.
Be Careful of Being Co-Opted
Peron warned us that government, corporations, and greedy profiteers would try to steal the marijuana industry from those of us who created it—black market growers. We now see his prediction has come true, as governments adopt so-called marijuana legalization not for social justice or health purposes but to reap tax and fee revenues from white market cannabis businesses.
A few American states have legalization that allows you to legally grow enough plants to supply your needs, but many so-called legalization laws include increased penalties for home growers and enhanced funding for police to go after us.
The big problem for the legalized cannabis industry is you can grow your own cannabis that’s much fresher, cleaner, and more fun—for a lower cost—than any buds you can buy at a legal dispensary or recreational marijuana shop.
That’s why in California and other places the legal white market marijuana industry has joined forces with police and prohibitionists to demand that black market growers and sellers be eradicated.
The goal of government is to destroy the small farmers who supplied all the world’s marijuana for decades, hand marijuana profits to the white market, tax the entire supply chain and the consumers themselves.
In America today we face so many entrenched webs of evil and wonder how to fight back and win.
The marijuana legalization movement as carried out by people like Peron is a righteous example. The most recent movement to successfully use these same tactics was Black Lives Matter during 2020 after George Floyd was murdered by police.
BLM was fueled by the same kind of outrage and refusal to back down that we had in the early marijuana legalization movement. They were willing to be physically attacked, unjustly imprisoned, slandered, fired, caged and otherwise abused. Republican lawmakers passed laws saying it was ok to run over BLM protesters, and it happened.
BLM refused to back down, and can be partially credited with Joe Biden winning in 2020, and with the American people finally forced to see how dangerous and racist police and criminal justice systems are.
I hope all progressives and liberals who want to fight back against the many horrific authoritarians in America will take heed of how real change is achieved. It’s not achieved solely by being a keyboard warrior. It’s also by having the guts to personally, forcefully take on the webs of evil no matter the cost.