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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’”

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

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.