09/03/2026
These two photographs tell a story 30 years in the making.
In the 1990s, the people behind Proposition 215 were patients, caregivers, doctors, attorneys, petitioners and activists fighting a government that still treated medical cannabis—and those who provided it—as criminals.
In 2026, some of those pioneers stood together at the California State Fair, where the “Prop 215 Freedom Fighters” received the Pebbles Trippet Lifetime Achievement Award for helping pass California’s Compassionate Use Act of 1996.
These photographs are powerful. But they cannot become the whole history.
Prop 215 grew out of suffering, compassion and civil disobedience—especially during the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, when Dennis Peron and Mary Jane “Brownie Mary” Rathbun risked arrest to get cannabis to people who needed it.
The San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club became an organizing center for a movement that would change America.
And that movement was much larger than the people who could make it to Sacramento this summer.
It included Dennis Peron, Brownie Mary Rathbun, Anna Boyce, Dale Gieringer, John Entwistle, Valerie and Mike Corral, Scott Imler, Dr. Tod Mikuriya, Bill Panzer, Leo Paoli, Pebbles Trippet, Ethan Nadelmann, Chris Conrad, Mikki Norris, Bill Zimmerman, Dave Fratello, Jim Gonzalez, George Zimmer, George Soros, Peter Lewis, John Sperling, Terence Hallinan, John Vasconcellos, Richard Cohen, Ivan Silverberg, James Canter, Jeff Jones, Rob Raich, Lynnette Shaw, Elvy Musikka, Ed Rosenthal, Ellen Komp, Debby Goldsberry, Michael and Michelle Aldrich, Jack Herer—and hundreds more.
That last part matters.
The California Cannabis Historical Society has documented more than 315 people who worked on the Prop 215 campaign. Some were there this year. Some could not be. Many are no longer with us.
Full Prop. 215 activist honor roll:
https://www.cacannabishistoricalsociety.org/215-activists
On November 5, 1996, 5,382,915 Californians voted YES on Proposition 215. With 55.58% of the vote, California became the first state in the modern era to protect qualified medical cannabis patients and caregivers from state criminal penalties for possession and cultivation with a physician’s recommendation.
Everything that followed was built on what they forced open.
At The Green Cross, we believe the legal cannabis industry has an obligation to remember what came before the licenses, investors, brands and billion-dollar markets: sick people, grieving friends, volunteers collecting signatures, doctors willing to speak out and activists willing to risk their freedom because compassion mattered more than prohibition.
We are here because they fought first.
Thirty years later, we owe them more than a medal.
Say their names. Preserve their history. Honor those we have lost. Keep compassion at the center of cannabis.
