Brownie Mary

Mary Jane Rathbun (December 22, 1922 – April 10, 1999), popularly known as Brownie Mary, was an American medical cannabis rights activist.

As a hospital volunteer at San Francisco General Hospital, she became known for baking and distributing cannabis brownies to AIDS patients.

Brownie Mary was born Mary Jane Rathbun in Chicago, Illinois, on December 22, 1922.

Her mother, a conservative Irish Catholic, named her "Mary Jane".

She was raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she attended Catholic school.

At the age of 13, she was involved in an altercation with a nun who tried to cane her, but Rathbun fought back.

As a teenager, she moved out of her home and found a job as a waitress; she worked as a waitress for most of her adult life.

Social activism appealed to her from a young age; she traveled from Chicago to Wisconsin to campaign for the right of miners to form unions.

In the late 1940s, she worked as an activist promoting abortion rights for women in Minneapolis.

During World War II, she moved to San Francisco, California, where she met a man at a United Service Organization (USO) dance.

They married, but soon divorced.

The marriage produced a daughter, Peggy, who was born in 1955.

She later moved to Reno, Nevada, but after Peggy was killed by a drunk driver in a car accident in the early 1970s, Rathbun returned to San Francisco.

Rathbun first met fellow activist Dennis Peron in 1974 in the Castro district at Cafe Flore, where they shared a joint.

While working as a waitress at the International House of Pancakes, she earned extra money selling cannabis-laced brownies; she became known in the Castro for selling "magical brownies" out of a basket for several dollars each.

Rathbun baked and sold cannabis brownies for profit out of her house.

Peron also sold Rathbun's brownies at his Big Top pot supermarket on Castro Street.

He was shot in the leg during a police raid on his business in 1977.

In the early 1980s, Rathbun was baking about 50 dozen cannabis brownies per day.

She advertised her "original recipe brownies" on San Francisco bulletin boards, calling them "magically delicious".

When they first began coming down with AIDS in the early 1980s, she noticed that cannabis helped them with the wasting syndrome; she also found this to be true of cancer patients.

An undercover police officer discovered what she was doing, and on the night of January 14, 1981, police raided Rathbun's home and found more than 18 lb of cannabis, 54 dozen cannabis brownies, and an assortment of other drugs.

When Rathbun opened the door, she reportedly told the police, "I thought you guys were coming."

She was 57 years old when she was first arrested.

It was at this time that the media began calling her "Brownie Mary".

She pleaded guilty to nine counts of possession and received three years probation.

The judge also sentenced her to 500 hours of community service.

Rathbun began working with the Shanti Project, a support group for people with HIV/AIDS.

According to Peron:

"Those first 500 hours she worked at a variety of places, from the gay thrift store to the Shanti project, doing her community service in record time—60 days. Although no longer obligated to do community service, she continued her work for St. Martin de Pores soup kitchen until 1982, when she joined the Shanti project, which was responding to the demands of the emerging AIDS crises. Mary had lost her only daughter in an auto accident ... and now she adopted every kid in San Francisco as her own."

Rathbun's brownie customers were mostly gay men.

Along with activist Dennis Peron, Rathbun lobbied for the legalization of cannabis for medical use, and she helped pass San Francisco Proposition P (1991) and California Proposition 215 (1996) to achieve those goals.

She also contributed to the establishment of the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club, the first medical cannabis dispensary in the United States.

Rathbun was arrested on three occasions, with each arrest bringing increased local, national, and international media attention to the medical cannabis movement.

Her grandmotherly appearance generated public sympathy for her cause and undermined attempts by the district attorney's office to prosecute her for possession.

The City of San Francisco eventually gave Rathbun permission to distribute cannabis brownies to people with AIDS.

Her arrests generated interest in the medical community and motivated researchers to propose one of the first clinical trials to study the effects of cannabinoids in HIV-infected adults.

Docket No. 05-16: "I spent about a year or so trying to find researchers willing to invest their time in this, and I couldn't find anybody. And then there was a report in the paper about a woman in California who, she was called "Brownie Mary." She made marijuana brownies for AIDS patients to help them with appetite. And she was arrested at—while she was getting marijuana to make into these brownies, and she worked at San Francisco General Hospital at the AIDS ward. And so I called doctors there, and I said one of your volunteers has just been arrested. Would you be interested in trying to do some research to show whether she was doing something that might actually have been helpful to these patients? She probably thought that it was helpful since, you know, she was permitted on the ward to do this. And so I spoke to a Dr. Donald Abrams and he said that he would be interested in trying to do research in this area, and so we started to collaborate"; Sheehy, 2000: "According to Donald Abrams, MD, lead author of the study and professor of clinical medicine in the UCSF Positive Health Program at San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center, this was the first attempt to study the effects of marijuana in people with HIV and one of the most comprehensive studies about the effects of marijuana on the immune system."

Werner, 2001, pp. 26–28; Abrams, 2002; Associated Press, 2005, p. 2A: "Abrams started his campaign [applying for a government-funded clinical trial] in 1992 when "Brownie Mary," a 73-year-old San Francisco General Hospital volunteer was arrested for supplying AIDS patients with marijuana-laced brownies; Russell, 2003: "Abrams' own scientific studies of medical marijuana were inspired by Mary Jane Rathburn, better known as "Brownie Mary"; Holland, 2010: p. 252: Abrams on how it began: "It all started when Rick Doblin sent a little message to the director of research at the AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital after Mary Rathbun was arrested in 1992, suggesting that a clinical trial showing the effectiveness of smoked marijuana should come from "Brownie Mary's Institution", as if she was our dean!"

Doblin talks about this, In the Matter of Lyle E. Craker, Ph.D., DEA.