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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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US: Marijuana Advocate To Run For Governor
Reuters Friday 26 Dec 1997 the sick Friday formally announced he would be a Republican candidate for governor in 1998. ``I will take the high road in this campaign,'' Cannabis Buyers Club founder Dennis Peron told reporters. ``It's about hope, empowerment and compassion. It's also about new priorities for our state. And it's about, as corny as it may sound, peace and love too.'' Peron, the gay Vietnam War veteran who led a successful campaign to legalize medical marijuana use in California, will take on powerful state Attorney General Dan Lungren in the Republican primary next year. Lungren, a law and order hardliner who has fought bitterly against Peron and his marijuana club, has raised millions of dollars for his campaign and is considered an overwhelming favorite. The two have been skirmishing in the courts over different interpretations of Proposition 215, the state measure passed last year making it legal for people sick AIDS, cancer and other serious ailments to use marijuana when directed to do so by a doctor. Peron, who helped to write the bill, has vowed to fight a Dec. 12 appeals court ruling which said California's estimated 20 marijuana buyer's clubs were still illegal because they do not qualify as ``primary care-givers.'' Lungren, for his part, has vowed to step up enforcement of anti- marijuana laws. Peron said in August that he was thinking about running for governor, and registered as a Republican -- prompting a dismissive snort from Lungren. ``If Dennis Peron is running for governor on the Republican ticket, he has smoked more marijuana than even I thought,'' he told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. But Friday the veteran peace activist said he was ready for the fight, and already had 1,000 of the 10,000 signatures he needed to get on the ballot. ``I knew there would a lot of jokes about me smoking pot, and me being part of the `60s,'' Peron told KCBS radio. ``But you know, I'll tell you who I am. I'm a man born of war.''
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