2 minute read
Last Look
CBTS Staff Report
Brownie Mary
Mary Jane Rathbun (aka Brownie Mary and the Florence Nightingale of the Medical Marijuana Movement) was born in Chicago on December 22, 1922 and died on April 10, 1999 in San Francisco. In the mid-1970s she began making and selling cannabis brownies out of her San Francisco kitchen to supplement her waitressing income. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic gripping San Francisco, Rathbun noticed her brownies helped her sick customers better cope with wasting syndrome. Soon she began to make hundreds of brownies with donated cannabis on a daily basis and gave them to patients. More formal activism within the established political structure followed. Fortunately, Rathbun was alive when California voters approved the Compassionate Use Act in 1996; sadly she missed seeing the recreational use of cannabis made legal in 2016. Today, her legacy lives on in extra-oily pot brownies, according to a 2019 article in “bon appétit” magazine penned by Madison Margolin. The fat is where the cannabis compounds reside. Not one to share the secret to her brownies, she did advise to “look at how much oil the recipe calls for, and go for the one that uses the most oil.”
