California changed the country with weed legalization — is it high time for the feds to catch up?

The horrific ride to the top of the San Francisco skyscraper is still seared in Paul Scott’s memory a quarter century later.

On a sales call for the elevator company that employed him in the mid-1990s, Scott stepped out at the penthouse level to find all the exits to the outside bolted shut — meant to deter desperate AIDS victims in a city gripped by a public health crisis.

Some were jumping to their deaths.

“Back then, there was nothing the doctors could do for you,” said Scott, 58, who would later contract HIV himself. “The drugs they had were worse than the disease.”

Marijuana was one of the rare things that could bring relief — if patients could get it.

Scott would enlist in a legalization crusade that would take him from the defiant San Francisco Cannabis Buyer’s Club to opening his own dispensary — Southern California’s first — in Inglewood. Along the way, he joined a loose affiliation of chronically ill patients and cannabis culture icons who would use California as a springboard to reshape drug policy nationwide.

Their efforts propelled the passage of the nation’s first medical marijuana law 25 years ago this week. California’s Proposition 215, titled the Compassionate Use Act, put the state in uncharted territory and set in motion a historic cultural shift throughout the country. [Read More @ The LA Times]