Historically, the buyers club model emerged partly in response to the global pandemic of HIV/AIDS, and the failure of the U.S. government to allow the gay community and people suffering from other illnesses such as cancer, to legally use cannabis as palliative medicine.
According to legal scholar Lewis A. Grossman, Peron "learned that people with AIDS smoked marijuana to combat the anorexia, nausea, wasting syndrome, and pain that accompanied the disease and its pharmaceutical treatments.
[2] According to Allen St. Pierre, gay rights and AIDS activists played a central role in the medical cannabis and buyers club movement.
Operating under the Bush administration, James O. Mason, chief of the Public Health Service, ended a federal program that provided medical cannabis free of charge to sick Americans.
Fred Gardner notes that "Dennis had three quarters of a pound, which he said he would provide to people who needed it for medical reasons —and free to those who couldn’t afford it.
[6][8][9] The third location operated out of the "Brownie Mary Building" at 1444 Market Street, a five floor commercial space in downtown San Francisco.
Membership in the club exceeded 8,000 at one point and required a doctor's note certifying the patient had AIDS, cancer, or other condition for which cannabis could be used to alleviate pain.