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.
