Medical marijuana clubs – this term is normally used for describing an organization that provides medical marijuana to patients on the recommendations given by a physician. This is known by other alternate names and these are – buyers’ club, collective, caregivers’ club, cooperative, farm, dispensary, holistic health center, non-profit resource center, pot club, and store and wellness center.
The concept of medical marijuana clubs was invented in 1973 by Dennis Peron, a San Francisco marijuana dealer who started serving the cause of medical use of cannabis when a young man with AIDS found relief from symptoms with regular marijuana use. This young man was his gay lover.
Peron was not only interested in providing a cafeteria of cannabis products that include marijuana of different potencies, smoking paraphernalia and cannabis pastries but he created a life space for people with seriously debilitating or life-threatening diseases to communicate with each other at a meeting point.
In its report in September 2006, “Medical Cannabis Dispensing Collectives and Local Regulation”, Americans for Safe Access (ASA) has stated as given in the following summary:
Planning as well as other local officials have been having lots of discussions about the medical marijuana clubs that are the dispensing collectives or dispensaries for a long time. Since the passage of proposition 215 in the year 1996, dispensaries have been operating openly in a number of communities. More than half the number of patients uses these dispensaries for getting marijuana for medical use by them for any serious illness.
It is not possible for most of the patients of medical marijuana to cultivate their medicine by themselves or find a caregiver who can do it for them. As of the year 2006, there are 200,000 patients in California who depend on the Medical Cannabis Dispensing Collective (MCDC) or dispensary for their marijuana for medical purposes.
California has now become the home of several ‘marijuana’ clubs that openly distribute marijuana to anyone who the club owners decide has a ‘medical’ need for the drug. In certain cases local police have made arrests and seizures; but in many cases local district attorneys have been reluctant to prosecute because the defendants have complied with the ‘spirit’ of Proposition 215.
Related posts:
Tags: concept, Marijuana, Medical Marijuana, medical marijuana club
