Mary Jane Rathbun AKA Brownie Mary: The Waitress Who Baked Pot Brownies for AIDS Patients

Feb 24, 2025

8 min read

Updated: Oct 9

Brownie Mary (Mary Jane Rathbun) smiling with a tray of brownies beside a cannabis leaf and a High Times magazine cover

When San Francisco police turned up at Mary Jane Rathbun’s flat on 14 January 1981, she thought she was opening the door to a customer. It was an undercover detective, and her response was two words long: “Oh shit.” Officers carried out more than 18 pounds of cannabis and 54 dozen brownies. She was 58, she waited tables at an IHOP and the papers soon had a new name for her: Brownie Mary.

That should’ve been the end of it. Instead the arrest put her on the wards where young men were dying of a disease nobody understood yet. Over the next 18 years she turned a kitchen sideline into one of the reasons California became the first US state to legalise medical cannabis.

Quick Answers

Who was Brownie Mary? Mary Jane Rathbun, a San Francisco waitress and hospital volunteer who baked cannabis brownies and gave them away to people with AIDS and cancer.
How many times was she arrested? Three: in 1981, 1982 and 1992. She never went to prison.
What did she change? She campaigned for San Francisco’s Proposition P in 1991 and California’s Proposition 215 in 1996, and helped start the country’s first public medical cannabis dispensary.
What happened to the recipe? She never shared it. It isn’t in her cookbook and it isn’t in her archive.
When did she die? On 10 April 1999 in San Francisco, after a heart attack.

The Catholic Schoolgirl Who Hit Back

Rathbun was born in Chicago on 22 December 1922 and grew up in Minnesota with an Irish Catholic mother. Her schooling ended at 13, when a nun tried to cane her and she fought back. She left home, found work as a waitress and stayed an atheist for the rest of her life. She’d go on waiting tables for about 40 years.

Mary Jane Rathbun, known as Brownie Mary, in her San Francisco kitchen holding a tin of baking and wearing her cannabis leaf vest

Politics came early too. As a teenager she went to Wisconsin to campaign for miners’ right to unionise, and in the 1940s she was arguing for abortion rights in Minneapolis. She moved to San Francisco during the Second World War, married, had a daughter called Peggy and divorced.

Peggy was killed by a drunk driver in 1974. That same year Rathbun got talking to a young dealer called Dennis Peron over a shared joint at Cafe Flore in the Castro. Peron ran the Big Top, a cannabis “grocery store” operating out of his third-floor flat at 715 Castro Street, and he also owned a cafe called The Island, which doubled as campaign headquarters for Harvey Milk. Milk later helped Peron pass Proposition W, a 1970s city measure telling police to stop arresting people for cannabis. The friendship between Peron and Rathbun lasted until she died.

Magically Delicious: The Brownie Business

Rathbun never pretended she got into baking out of kindness. She was a waitress heading for retirement with no savings, and brownies paid. She sold them from a napkin-lined basket around the Castro for $2 to $4 each, and Peron stocked them at the Big Top. Customers queued on the stairs up to her flat.

She didn’t invent the pot brownie either. Alice B. Toklas had put a hashish sweet in her 1954 cookbook, and Rathbun took her cue from that and from Peron. What she did have was a knack for marketing. She pinned flyers to noticeboards promising “magically delicious” brownies made to an original recipe. The stars and squiggles drawn on them were enough to catch the eye of the police.

Detective Sergeant Robert Bullard posed as a customer and the raid followed. To pay her lawyer, Rathbun sold nearly everything she owned, including the kitchen table the brownies had been made on. She pleaded guilty to nine counts of possession and got three years’ probation plus 500 hours of community service. She finished the lot in 60 days.

Dennis Robert Peron in jail in the late 70s

From Dealer to Volunteer

The community service was meant as a punishment, but she kept going back after it ended, and it led her to the Shanti Project, one of the first groups supporting people with AIDS. On 7 December 1982 she was arrested again, this time on Market Street with four dozen brownies she was taking to a friend going through chemotherapy. The charges were dropped. The judge told her the Brownie Mary act had to stop.

It didn’t. By then her friends in the Castro were getting sick and she’d seen what cannabis did for nausea and appetite, so she stopped selling and started giving the brownies away. Every Thursday she turned up at Ward 86, the AIDS clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, to visit patients and carry specimens to the lab. The hospital named her Volunteer of the Year in 1986. She called the patients her kids.

Brownie Mary holding a plate of pot brownies in a cannabis field, wearing glasses and a vest covered in badges

The economics were odd. Growers left cannabis on her doorstep anonymously, and she bought the flour, sugar and eggs out of a Social Security cheque of about $650 a month. Peron reckoned she baked 134 dozen brownies a month between 1984 and 1990, which is roughly 1,600. Demand still outstripped supply, so she put names in a cookie jar and drew them out.

She ate her own product too. Half a brownie in the morning and half in the evening took the edge off her arthritis and two artificial knees. At her memorial a friend, Amy Casey, remembered her going from bed to bed in the early 1980s, when nobody was yet sure how AIDS was passed on. Rathbun herself shrugged that sort of talk off. “I didn’t go into this thinking I would be a hero,” she said in 1993.

Did Brownie Mary Go to Jail?

No. She was arrested three times and was never sent to prison, and the third arrest did her cause far more good than harm.

In November 1991 San Francisco voters backed Proposition P, a measure urging the state to allow medical cannabis, with 79% in favour. Rathbun had campaigned for it alongside Peron. Eight months later, on 19 July 1992, she was at a grower friend’s house in Cazadero in Sonoma County, stirring cannabis into brownie batter, when police walked in. She was 69 and facing felony charges over two and a half pounds of the stuff.

Sonoma’s district attorney, Gene Tunney, announced she’d be treated the same as any other dealer. That turned out to be a mistake. On 25 August she testified at City Hall in San Francisco, where the Board of Supervisors gave her a standing ovation, voted to make medical cannabis arrests the city’s lowest policing priority and declared it Brownie Mary Day. Outside, in front of a crowd put at 5,000, she announced that if the narcs expected her to stop baking they could “go f*** themselves in Macy’s window”.

Her lawyer was the San Francisco defence attorney Tony Serra, and the hearing in Santa Rosa drew reporters from well beyond California. She pleaded not guilty. A Sonoma food writer who had lunch with her that day recalled the judge telling her off for wearing a tiny gold cannabis leaf on a chain. Rathbun replied that it was a present from her late daughter and she’d never taken it off.

She was offered a plea deal with a $10,000 fine. She turned it down and asked for a jury. The district attorney, deciding a trial would be a media circus, dropped the charges.

The Doctor Watching in Amsterdam

One person following the story was Dr Donald Abrams, an AIDS specialist at San Francisco General. He was in an Amsterdam hotel room during that summer’s International AIDS Conference when the television news showed a volunteer from his own hospital being arrested. Rick Doblin, who ran a research group called MAPS, then wrote to the hospital suggesting that Brownie Mary’s institution ought to be the one to test whether cannabis helped with AIDS wasting.

Abrams agreed. By the end of 1992 he’d sketched out a three-month pilot study comparing 20 patients smoking cannabis with 20 taking THC pills. Getting permission took five years. The FDA approved the plan in 1994, the National Institute on Drug Abuse refused to supply the cannabis in 1995 and a rewritten application was rejected in 1996. A $978,000 grant finally came through on 18 September 1997.

The first results were released in July 2000. Cannabis didn’t interfere with patients’ HIV drugs, and those who smoked it put on an average of 3.51kg against 1.30kg for the placebo group. Rathbun had been dead for 15 months. Abrams, looking back on it years later, said he’d learned that “science is not driving the train”.

The Buyers Club and Prop 215

Also in 1992, Rathbun helped Peron, John Entwistle and Dr Tod Mikuriya set up the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club, the first public medical cannabis dispensary in the country. It started in Peron’s house, with a Brownie Mary’s Cafe in the basement, and grew into a five-storey operation with nearly 12,000 members. The founders half hoped to be raided so they could argue the case in court. For years the police declined to oblige.

In November 1996 Californians passed Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, with 56% of the vote. It was the first state law of its kind, and Rathbun’s years on Ward 86 had done a lot to make voters comfortable with it. The following year she and Peron were Grand Marshals of the San Francisco Pride parade.

What Was Brownie Mary’s Brownie Recipe?

Nobody knows, and she made sure of it. When she and Peron published a cookbook in 1996 it had recipes for black bean soup, chip dip, spaghetti sauce and chestnut stuffing. It didn’t have the brownies. “She would never put the famous brownie recipe in it,” Peron said. Her plan was to sell it to Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines once cannabis was legal and spend the money on “an old Victorian for my kids with AIDS”.

There are a few clues. The police inventory from the 1981 raid is said to have listed 35 pounds of margarine, 22 dozen eggs and 50 pounds of flour and sugar alongside the cannabis. Entwistle said she’d once told him the shortcut was to buy whichever boxed brownie mix had the most oil in it. And the Sonoma food writer who lunched with her in 1992 came away convinced the cannabis went in as an infused butter.

Her papers are now at the San Francisco Public Library, along with her badge-covered vest, her cookbook and some handwritten biscuit recipes. The library’s catalogue makes a point of saying the brownie recipe isn’t there.

How Did Brownie Mary Die?

By the mid-1990s arthritis had stopped her baking, and at one stage the pain was bad enough that she thought about contacting Dr Jack Kevorkian. In August 1998 she fell, needed surgery on her neck and spine and ended up in a wheelchair. That December a San Francisco Chronicle column reported that she was recovering in hospital and that nobody had thought to bring her any of her favourite medicine.

Mary Jane Rathbun in later life examining the leaves of a plant indoors, wearing glasses and a pink shirt — Mary Jane Rathbun in later life.

She died of a heart attack at Laguna Honda Hospital on 10 April 1999. Her usual birth date makes her 76, though several obituaries printed 77.

A week later about 300 people gathered on Castro Street for a candlelit vigil. Joints went round, and somebody left a single brownie wrapped in foil at the shrine. The city’s district attorney, Terence Hallinan, spoke from the back of a red pickup truck with a three-foot cannabis plant beside him. He called her a hero, compared her to Florence Nightingale and promised not to prosecute anyone using cannabis on a doctor’s recommendation. Peron told the crowd, “I figure right now she’s making a deal with God.” His guess was a dozen free brownies in return for getting in.

Mayor Willie Brown proclaimed 2 May 1999 Brownie Mary Day, which means she ended up with two. Peron died in 2018. The recipe still hasn’t turned up.