Former Cafe Flore owner Terrance Alan started as a member of the “gay weed mafia” that won medical marijuana legalization in 1996, and co-founded the SF Entertainment Commission. And the Flore Dispensary owner has just passed away at age 73.

If there were a Mount Rushmore honoring the four San Franciscans who are most responsible for legal marijuana, Terrance Alan’s face would be on that Mount Rushmore, along with Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary.

In the 1990s, the SFPD described Terrance Alan as part of “Dennis Peron’s gay weed mafia,” and often busted Alan’s parties. But once Peron, Alan, and Brownie Mary worked to legalize medical marijuana in 1996’s Prop 215, Terrance Alan founded the nation’s first ever nonprofit cannabis dispensary CHAMP (Californians Helping to Alleviate Medical Problems) right here in San Francisco. Alan has most recently been the owner of the Castro’s Flore Dispensary, and co-founded City Hall’s SF Entertainment Commission in 2009.

But as noted in the above post from SPARC dispensary CEO Erich Pearson, Terrance Alan has died. SFst confirmed the sad news with staff members at the Flore Dispensary. He was 73.

“Terrance always rose to the occasion,” Pearson told SFist on Monday. “Every time I ever talked to Terrance or was around Terrance, there was always some community project he was working on. He was a tireless advocate for the community. He always put the community first.”

Any of us would do well in life to earn the kind of writeup Alan got in this 2009 New York Times profile. As the Times described, “Terrance Alan has worked in construction and owned strip joints, taught handicapped children and peddled low-budget gay pornographic movies, mostly starring Terrance Alan.”

These days Alan is best known as the founder and owner of the Castro’s Flore dispensary, and was also the co-owner of the famed Cafe Flore across the street from 2016 to its then-closure in 2020. (Cafe Flore became Fisch & Flore under new ownership last year, but that too has since closed.) And when he was co-owner of Cafe Flore, Alan tried to start serving infused cannabis drinks, until the law told him he could not do that.

But Terrance Alan did many other things that law said he could not do, because he got the laws changed. “It was Cafe Flore where Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary met and came up with the idea of Prop 215,” Alan told me in 2018.

He then helped them pass Prop 215, and opened his own dispensary CHAMP. Once recreational cannabis arrived in late 2016, Alan co-wrote what would be SF’s legal marijuana laws on the San Francisco Cannabis Legalization Task Force and the state-level California State Legalization Task Force.

“When [legal] cannabis came around and there was a void on the cannabis task force, Terrance was the one who stepped up and just put voluminous amounts of work and volunteer hours to building a task force that worked for the cannabis industry,” Pearson tells us.

You may also remember Alan’s work establishing the Love Parade that used to happen in the mid-2000s. Alan also founded the advocacy group SF Late Night Coalition, which became legitimate and turned into the official SF Entertainment Commission that still meets at City Hall today.

“When it was late-night issues in the neighborhoods, and the conflict during the [Mayor Willie] Brown days between entertainment and neighbors, Terrance was the one along with some others were quite the force in City Hall, forming the SF Late Night Coalition, and the SF Entertainment Commission came out of that too,” Pearson says.

Terrance Alan’s cause of death is unclear, though associates tell us he has recently been in an ICU. We may learn more in time for the many, many remembrances and memorials that San Francisco will hold for him in the weeks to come.

Related: Legal Pot Turns 25: The Sticky Road from Medical Marijuana Raids to a $4 Billion Industry [SFist

Image: Terrance Alan via Facebook