Queer activists helped build legal cannabis from the ground up. The industry should remember that history before respectability politics leaves it with no real allies.
Corporate Pride is retreating, even though the business case for supporting LGBTQ+ people has never been clearer. Queer consumers are loyal, vocal, culturally powerful, and connected to every taste-making industry on earth. GLAAD cites an estimate from LGBT Capital that LGBTQ consumers have $1.4 trillion in U.S. spending power. Brands know this. They are not confused about our community’s economic value. They are scared.
Scared of political retribution. Scared of being dragged before Congress. Scared of becoming the next target in a culture war they would rather not fight. Anheuser-Busch distanced itself after the backlash. Target scaled back its Pride collection. The cannabis industry should pay close attention to what happens next, because the same political forces coming for queer people also have cannabis in their sights.
Queer Cannabis History Was Forged in the AIDS Crisis
LGBTQ+ people helped lead the modern fight to legalize medical cannabis. During the AIDS crisis, when the federal government made it clear that it was content to watch our community die, queer activists in San Francisco treated cannabis as medicine because the institutions around them had failed.
Brownie Mary, born Mary Jane Rathbun, baked cannabis brownies for AIDS patients at San Francisco General Hospital. She was arrested for distributing cannabis and helped ignite a political fight the city could no longer ignore.
Dennis Peron lost his partner, Jonathan West, to AIDS and turned that grief into a movement. His work helped create Proposition 215, the 1996 Compassionate Use Act that made California the first state to broadly legalize medical cannabis.
Early access models such as the Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative were sustained by activists, including Paul Scott, who served on its board and later opened the Inglewood Medical Cannabis Center.
There is no legal cannabis industry without the fight LGBTQ+ people helped lead.
Thirty years later, queer people remain disproportionately represented among cannabis consumers. Data from New York City’s 2023 Community Health Survey found that 34% of gay and lesbian adults and 39% of bisexual adults reported using cannabis in the previous 30 days, compared with 14% of straight adults. National research has documented similar disparities among sexual-minority consumers. That should matter to every dispensary, operator, investor, and brand in cannabis.
Culture Built What Capital Now Wants
This goes beyond who buys the weed. It is also about who made weed culturally possible.
LGBTQ+ people have long carried disproportionate influence in the industries that produce culture: music, fashion, nightlife, entertainment, and media. Before cannabis had conferences and stock exchange listings, it had parties, artists, drag queens, DJs, nightlife workers, and communities willing to make the plant visible.
The normalization legal cannabis needs to survive politically will not be built in boardrooms. It will be built in the same places it always has been: queer spaces, queer art, queer nightlife, and queer community. That ecosystem is still producing the cultural legitimacy this industry runs on.
A rainbow logo and a Pride float do not amount to support. Supporting queer cannabis means carrying LGBTQ+ brands on dispensary shelves. It means investing in queer founders and operators. It means building real relationships with queer communities year-round and understanding that Pride is not a seasonal marketing window. It is a political and cultural inheritance that must be continually earned.
As a co-founder of FLAMER, I see this every day. We build our calendar around community events throughout the year. We partnered with Sasha Colby on a product campaign that reached national media and brought a proudly queer cannabis collaboration into the mainstream conversation. Our packed 420 party generated attention far beyond its budget.
Our biggest operational problem has been keeping product on shelves. That is not only because the creative is sharp. It is because New York cannabis consumers actually want what we are building.
Respectability Will Not Save Cannabis
The cannabis industry is chasing institutional legitimacy at the exact moment reactionary culture is least interested in offering it.
Cannabis is making the same mistake corporate Pride made: mainstream money floods in, the culture gets sanitized for mass appeal, and the queer roots are quietly erased. The calculation is always the same. Shed the counterculture associations. Court the center. Chase respectability.
When the political climate turns, as it already has for cannabis, the industry may discover that it has lost the community that built it without ever winning over the establishment it was chasing.
Cannabis will not earn mainstream acceptance by abandoning the people who made legal access possible. The path forward still runs through queer spaces, queer founders, and queer culture. Celebrate those roots. Invest in them. Build on them. An industry that honors where it came from has a better chance of surviving what comes next.
The work our community started decades ago made this industry possible. The question now is whether cannabis will honor that history or repeat the same corporate cowardice it once claimed to be better than.
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
35mm film photos by Matías Alvial + Paloma Huntington-Ortega
