"On December 1, 1991, World AIDS Day, the popular news program 60 Minutes aired a segment entitled 'Smoking to Live.' It focused on Barbra and Kenny Jenks, a young couple infected with HIV. They had been arrested for growing two marijuana plants.
The segment also has footage of Dr. Lester Grinspoon talking about his late son Danny, a young leukemia patient who would use marijuana to help him cope with chemo. Rarely has any media coverage of the medical cannabis issue been quite so compelling. And while many Americans were aware of the medical marijuana issue, the 60 Minutes piece galvanized America's opinion that safe, legal access to marijuana could be a good thing.
Unbelievably, just three months after the 60 Minutes broadcast, the Bush Senior Administration closed the only program in the country allowing the seriously ill to apply for legal access to federal supplies of marijuana. America was furious and the Administration faced an unexpected backlash of anger and condemnation. It was this anger, particularly among the AIDS community, that set the course for the first citywide medical marijuana ballot initiative in San Francisco, Prop P.
Soon other California communities followed the lead of San Francisco and in 1996 California passed a statewide ballot initiative, Prop 215, which authorized in-state cultivation and legal access to marijuana for those with certain medical conditions."