Dennis Peron, father of medical marijuana dies at 72

Dennis Peron, the father of medical marijuana in California, dies at 72.

Paron was a cannabis activist who fired up the movement to legalise medical marijuana in California.

He died on Saturday in San Francisco hospital.

Paron was also a prominent figure in San Francisco’s gay community. He was credited as a pioneer in recognizing the health benefits of marijuana during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

“A man that changed the world,” his brother Jeffrey Peron wrote on Facebook. “It is with a heavy heart that I announce the passing of my brother Dennis Peron.”

Peron, a friend of slain gay rights activist Harvey Milk, helped push through a San Francisco ordinance that allowed the use of medical marijuana. That was seen as a precursor to the statewide legalization of medical pot in 1996 with the passage of California Proposition 215.

Today, medical marijuana is legal in most U.S. states and Washington, D.C.

Peron suffered from lung cancer. He lost his partner, Jonathan West, to Aids in 1990.

Born in New York, he was drafted in the late 1960s to serve in Vietnam, where he first encountered cannabis, according to media reports his brother posted on Facebook.

At the height of the US war on drugs in the early 1990s, Peron founded the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club, the nation’s first public marijuana dispensary.

He was arrested several times and was once shot in the leg by a police officer, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“Not many people would have had the courage at the time that he took up the mantle,” Terrance Alan, a member of the city’s Cannabis Commission, told the newspaper.