John Entwistle: Documenting History, Fighting for Change
Written by Jessica Peralta
A look at the impact of Dennis Peron and John Entwistle, Jr., who
co-founded the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club.
No conversation about the history of medical cannabis access can happen without talking about John Entwistle, Jr. and his late partner, Dennis Peron.
“I’ve been an activist for quite a few decades now. And I started the first Cannabis Buyers Club in the entire planet, along with Dennis Peron and along with Dennis Peron, helped write Proposition 215, the first statewide cannabis law, the one in 1996 — The Compassionate Use Act of ’96, which … was the first legalization law in California and in America,” said Entwistle.
Though Peron passed away in 2018 at 72, Entwistle continues to work to use Peron’s name to further the causes they’ve been so passionate about. He serves as director of the Dennis Peron Legacy Project, with a mission “to celebrate the life of Dennis Peron, the man who authored Proposition 215, The Compassionate Use Act of 1996. Dennis’s life work ended the war on pot and gave birth to the legal cannabis industry in the United States.”
Brownie Mary (from left), Dennis Peron, and John Entwistle chat in an archival photo that hangs on the wall of the San Francisco home Dennis and John shared.
Getting involved in a movement
How It Started
“I was living on the street,” Entwistle said. “I was 17 years old and Dennis was our speaker. He would come out and speak at our smoke-ins in Washington Square Park in New York City.”
Originally from New York, Entwistle said he met Peron “through the hippies, through the smoke-ins.” Entwistle was helping the organizers of the smoke-ins in New York City. They became friends immediately.
Then in the 1980s, the AIDS crisis hit.
“At the beginning of it, it didn’t even have a name,” he said. “And my friend Jonathan was Dennis’s friend who used to come out, [Jonathan West] was one of the early people to have that.”
Entwistle came out to San Francisco to see how he could help — and he stayed.
Posters promoting California Proposition 215 hang in the San Francisco home of Dennis Person and John Entwistle.
How The movement Grew
Picking up momentum
After the move, the first thing Entwistle did was start organizing smoke-ins and gatherings in San Francisco.
“So over the next couple of years, I organized six or seven or eight of those and got to know some people that way and made some friends,” he said. “And during that time period, the AIDS epidemic progressed and a lot of our friends died —and were very, very sick. And we found ourselves delivering a lot of care and spending a lot of time helping those people, put us on the front lines there.”
He said both he and Peron were already activists in terms of marijuana, but the idea of seeing cannabis as medicine was new.
“Prior to that, we’d seen it through different other ways, more of a freedom issue and all kinds of different ways, but not necessarily as a pure medical thing,” he said. “Watching it in the AIDS epidemic, where all of a sudden people have to eat all of these pills that are really tough on their stomach and everybody knows pot really helps your stomach, it’s a definite calming thing. Everybody in the world knows that.
“And so it would help people that would otherwise be throwing up these pills and didn’t want to eat another pill. And it was also helping with the depression issues. It would help with the appetite a lot. The wasting syndrome was a huge thing and it was very real.”
That’s where their arguments supporting the medical use of cannabis came from.
“That’s why Dennis did in 1991, the first local initiative, Prop. P,” he said.
Entwistle was part of the effort to collect signatures for the proposition.
“We collected the nine or 10,000 signatures you need to get on the ballot locally and we got like 90 percent yes on this thing from the voters of San Francisco,” he said. “It was just ridiculous how strongly everybody supported this initiative. And that really changed everything. All of a sudden, the newspapers from around the world are calling, you know, they want to talk to Dennis and they want … ‘Explain, why did you do this?’”
A memorial of Dennis Peron hangs in the San Francisco home he shared with John Entwistle.
Intersectionality
Gay Culture Meets Marijuana Culture
Entwistle said there’s an intersectionality when it comes to the histories of the LGBTQ+ and cannabis movements.
“It’s about the overlap in history and the similarity in the development process between the gay and lesbian, bisexual, transgender, plus queer-plus movement and the cannabis movement,” he said. “We started with Harvey Milk [the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California]. … He was a great, great guy. But it took a combined effort. It took pothead votes. And it also took a lot of gay votes to put him into the board of supervisors.”
When Peron attended an event, he would clearly define the worlds he brought together.
“His first words would be, my name is Dennis Peron, and I’m a gay man from San Francisco. He’d do that to build a bridge, to say, you know, yeah, we’re talking about pot here,” he said. “But he’d make it clear that it wasn’t a one-ticket thing … there’s other issues here as well.”
He did this for a reason.
“It had to do with something that Harvey Milk said, which was that if everybody comes out of the closet and speaks about this stuff openly, we change the world and people start identifying people as people as opposed to, you know, wondering who they are behind those doors and all this sort of thing and harming each other without even knowing who we’re harming, without even knowing the people we’re hurting,” Entwistle said.
John Entwistle recalls his experiences advocating for medical marijuana with Dennis Peron during a 2023 interview with Scary Plants Media.
Looking Ahead
Peering into the future
“Something good will come of this.”
Entwistle said the 2016 California Proposition 64 (Adult Use of Marijuana Act) that legalized cannabis in California has created challenges.
“It creates a huge bureaucracy and a lot of taxes and a lot of regulations and a lot of red tape,” he said. “And the problem here is that your red tape and your regulations are not in proportion to the risk of the problem.”
He called cannabis the “safest drug known to mankind.”
“You don’t need the kind of restrictions that you would put on, on a more dangerous product,” he said. “And that’s what you’ve really got here. So you’re wrapping it up in red tape. But that defies all logic. I mean, where’s the referee that comes in and says, wait a minute … nobody needs to be protected from pot.”
He said the people that need it the most and are using it for serious reasons, they tend to need more of it. But because of the regulations, amounts are limited.
“We get this show your ID at the gate, you can only buy an ounce a day. You know, you have to get it in these little jars,” he said. “You got to pay a huge amount of money for this. That’s not fair. That’s not legalization. That’s a bias against us that’s unhealthy and wrong.”
And this leads to more problems.
“The folks that smoke a lot tend to be doing it for very important reasons,” he said. “And when you take that option away from them, you’re causing them to turn to other drugs in a lot of cases or other things. And that’s not good.”
And yet he is optimistic for the future of cannabis.
“Both the Republican Party and the Democrat Party want to claim voters and they want pot voters. They know that we vote and we know that we vote all over the place and they want our votes,” he said. “And so once they start competing to put out a good federal situation on this, whether it’s take it off the schedule entirely, which is certainly a possibility or just reschedule it, as they’re discussing now, you know, I believe it’s gonna happen.”