Napa & Sonoma cannabis leaders weigh in on proposal to change how drug is classified. “Historic” — that’s the word that came up over and over again among North Bay, state and national cannabis leaders in describing a proposal to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug. The proposal by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) would move marijuana from the Schedule I category, with drugs like heroin, and into the Schedule III category, alongside ketamine and some anabolic steroids. The proposed change comes on the heels of a recommendation from U.S. Health and Human Services and a call by President Joe Biden for a review of federal drug policy. Brandon Levine, CEO of Sonoma County-based Mercy Wellness, sent a letter last month to the White House asking for a change. A letter signed by the president was returned to Levine, taking issue with people languishing in jail over marijuana possession.
Lynette Shaw Just Keeps Going
Lynette Shaw is one of the medical cannabis movement’s most important pioneers. Known as the Godmother of Ganja, Shaw opened the first licensed medical cannabis dispensary, the Marin Alliance CBC, thanks to a law that she helped create. Shaw’s relationship with cannabis began years before her advocacy when she started selling weed at 14. Leaving home at a young age, her gift for music led Shaw to Hollywood, where she continued to sell cannabis on the side while working on a singing career. In 1981, John Belushi invited Shaw to be a backup singer with The Blues Brothers. Tragically, she was only in the band for one month before Belushi died. Shaw’s seeds of activism were planted in 1990 when she met Jack Herer. His groundbreaking book The Emperor Wears No Clothes confirmed her belief that cannabis is medicine.
From motorcycle gangs to SWAT raids: How Lynnette became the “godmother of legal cannabis”
After decades of bitter legal battles and constant harassment by the feds, the self-described “godmother of legal cannabis” watched as cannabis professionals briskly walked into investor meetings and proudly displayed their wares. Under her tearful gaze, the increasingly normalizing business of cannabis looks anything but ordinary; the realization of her lifelong dream was too hard won to take for granted now. “It’s surreal and it’s fabulous,” says Shaw. “It’s what I had envisioned, but I didn’t know it would take over 20 years.” When she opened what she believes was the country’s first dispensary in 1997, Shaw unwittingly became what she describes as “the test case for the entire industry.” Caught in the crosshairs of a supportive local government and the virulently anti-cannabis administrations of three different presidents, the CBC Marin Alliance became one of the nation’s main cannabis battlegrounds.
Best Reasons to Love the Marin Alliance
Though there are cannabis delivery services in Marin, some legit and some fly-by-night, there is really only one bonafide dispensary in the county. It’s the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana (MAMM) in Fairfax, which accommodates both medical and recreational users and has more history than any other dispensary in the United States. Medical patients are required to show up with a note from a doctor and a valid driver’s license or another form of identification. MAMM was founded 23 years ago by the legendary Lynnette Shaw, otherwise known as the “Green Queen” and the “Godmother of Medical Marijuana.” President Bill Clinton, who claimed that he smoked, but didn’t inhale, tried to put Shaw out of business. In 2011 the federal government finally shuttered her establishment, but with ample help from her dogged lawyers and from the courts, she bounced back and reopened in 2017 with a wham-bam party, complete with free food and free beverages.
Longtime Marin County cannabis advocate looks back on legacy of California legalization
Lynnette Shaw, who founded Marin Alliance CBC, believed to be the state’s first medicinal marijuana dispensary, wiped away tears recalling Tax Day 1994, when dispensary patients linked arms around the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club to avert a law enforcement raid. “Thousands of people went around the block to protect us. Their bodies were frail, with their little skinny arms,” she said with her voice cracking. “Some were grandmas.” The paddy wagons pulled up, and the crowd yelled: “Boo,” Shaw said. Law enforcement personnel paused. “They never got out of the van. After a long time, the big black van pulled away,” she added. Many of the people who confronted police that day in San Francisco were AIDS patients trying to secure their source of relief, a drug considered illegal. As far back as the early 1980s, these users, several lining hospital hallways, were enduring a fatal, debilitating disease — Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome — and pot helped fight painful symptoms.
How Liberal Marin County Turned NIMBY on Cannabis
In 1996, a few months before California voters passed Proposition 215, America’s first medical cannabis law, a blues singer named Lynnette Shaw opened the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana dispensary. “It was not legal, not even a little bit,” Shaw acknowledges today. Even so, the place just seemed so quintessentially Marin County. Her cannabis shop opened beneath verdant hills, situated next to a yoga wellness studio and a hot tub, sauna, and sundeck in Fairfax, a tiny town with an Art Deco movie theater and decidedly progressive politics. Marin County, located just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, was the home of the Grateful Dead and cannabis-fragrant, clothing-optional music fests in the 1960s. Three decades later, 73 percent of local voters supported Proposition 215. After its passage, the five Green Party members on the Fairfax Town Council in 1997 heartily approved a business license for the Marin Alliance.
Front Lines: The Queer, Cannabis-Fueled Legacy of Dennis Peron and Lynette Shaw.
In 1995, something surprising happened. A local chief of police in Marin County, California, asked Lynette Shaw to coffee. As an advocate for cannabis and the known purveyor of an illegal, underground cannabis club, she didn’t exactly make regular coffee dates with the law. The chief wanted to talk to her about AIDS. He had an officer down from working in the field, and apparently this officer wasn’t the only member of the police force silently suffering from what was still termed “the gay disease.” Even more surprisingly, he asked Shaw about cannabis brownies and how this man could medicate. The sick man was losing 25 pounds a month, and the Chief was looking for guidance. “I said, ‘If I were you, I would hand your patient some literature and turn a blind eye,’” she admitted. “I gave him my pager number, and he got back to me and said ‘The officer gained 30 pounds; he is much better, and I really believe this is something important.’”
The Regulars: Pot advocate is the ‘Godmother of Ganja’
Cannabis activist Lynnette Shaw has been working to legalize medical use marijuana for the past 20 years. Her work advocating the benefits of marijuana has earned her the name the Godmother of Ganja. She says the positive medicinal effects of marijuana helped her overcome depression. Since has been an outspoken advocate educating the public about pot’s medicinal effects. From legalization to education, Shaw has never backed down. After serving several months in Contra Costa County jail for possession of marijuana for sale in 1991, she started working for Dennis Peron’s Cannabis Buyers Club in San Francisco, helping in 1996 to pass Proposition 215, which made California the first state to legalize medical marijuana use. Shaw went on to found the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana, which opened that same year in Fairfax. The federal government sued Shaw in 1998 seeking to close the dispensary. It remained open until 2011, when it was shut down by U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag. The alliance later reopened under a ruling from U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, becoming the first state-legal medical marijuana dispensary. When the Shaw is not selling medical cannabis, the Godmother of Ganja plays piano at Sunday service for St. Rita’s Church, feeding the homeless and singing with her band, Blues Champions.
GREAT VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20fHWBYPBFE&rco=1
NOTE: https://www.sfchronicle.com/thetake/article/The-Regulars-Pot-advocate-is-the-Godmother-of-12508951.php
Marin County’s ‘Godmother of Marijuana’ Is Back in Business
She’s baaaaaack! Lynette “Bluesetta” Shaw is a first-generation pioneer of California’s massive medical marijuana market. Her decades-long legal saga is finally ending and her groundbreaking dispensary, which was shut down in 2011, is back in business — under the same permit. Mayberry, on acid — that’s how Fairfax, California is described by one of the people swarming what passes for an office park in the small Marin County town, about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. Next door to a weathered building with a long, low-pitched roof (reminiscent of a Japanese Buddhist temple—or a Pizza Hut without the crown) is a Little League baseball diamond, which shares a parking lot with the office park’s anchor commercial tenants; a co-working space that calls itself a “business sanctuary,” a hot-tub complex with a clothing-optional sundeck and, underneath the roof, Lynette Shaw’s Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana — one of the first medical-marijuana dispensaries in the United States and the only legal cannabis outlet in Marin county.
The Queen of Green
The story of Lynnette Shaw is, in essence, the story of medical cannabis in California. Before she was sued by President Bill Clinton, before she was tailed 24-7 by DEA agents, and before she was taken into hiding by the Wu-Tang Clan — yes, all those things really happened — Shaw was working with legendary cannabis advocate Dennis Peron to help patients suffering from AIDS find relief in the form of cannabis. In 1996, Shaw started the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana Alliance, or MAMM, in the Marin County town of Fairfax. “I like to think of myself as the godmother of dispensaries,” Shaw says, “and that all the dispensaries are my godchildren.” She certainly has a claim to the title, as hers was the first dispensary in the country ever to receive a permit to sell medical marijuana. Sitting at a makeshift desk at the back of her store, Shaw beams with pride as recalls the many people she helped — she refers to her patients as her family — and the long, arduous battle she’s waged to return to the place where it all began.