cannabisnews.com:  'Brownie' Mary Rathbun Dies!





 'Brownie' Mary Rathbun Dies!
Posted by FoM on April 12, 1999 at 12:40:26 PT
May Her Wonderful Spirit Live On!
Source: SF Gate
Mary Jane Rathbun, the grandmotherly activist whose arrests for distributing pot brownies to AIDS patients built momentum for the medicinal marijuana movement, has died. She was 77. 
``Brownie Mary'' died at Laguna Honda Hospital Saturday night. She had been hospitalized for months, confined to a wheelchair and in considerable pain, since injuring her spine in a fall last August, said her friend and executor, Larry Bittner. A Laguna Honda spokeswoman said the hospital would not release a cause of death, and referred questions to Bittner. Ms. Rathbun became a fixture at San Francisco General Hospital in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, spending three decades preparing and delivering marijuana-laced baked goods to sick people. ``I think she made 134 dozen a month during the heyday, 1984 to 1990. All in her little old kitchen in her subsidized apartment. And you could smell it all through her building. The old ladies there were all cool about it; hey, it's San Francisco,'' said Dennis Peron, who with Ms. Rathbun founded the now-defunct San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club. Ms. Rathbun's was arrested three times and twice agreed to perform hundreds of hours of community service, spending the time with AIDS patients, Peron said. The arrests created a groundswell of support for San Francisco's Proposition P and later, the 1996 state initiative that made growing and using marijuana with a doctor's permission legal under California law. Advocates had argued for decades that marijuana helps treat the eye pressure that causes glaucoma and eases nausea and pain for cancer and AIDS patients. Her arrests also prompted scientific research into whether consuming marijuana really does have medicinal benefits. With Peron, she also published ``Brownie Mary's Marijuana Cookbook'' in 1991, which is missing the key recipe. Peron said that before she died, she asked him to try to sell the recipe and give the proceeds to charity. ``She would never put the famous brownie recipe in it,'' Peron said. ``Now I've got to get the brownie recipe from her safe deposit box, and approach Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, whatever, and sell it and use the proceeds for her `kids.''' Ms. Rathbun, who came to San Francisco from Minnesota after World War Two, had one daughter who died in a car accident in the early 1970s. She had no other survivors, Bittner and Peron said. ``She was the mother of every gay kid in San Francisco,'' Peron said. ``And even if you were in your eighties, you were a kid.'' This just breaks my heart! God Bless Her for all her love and hard work!
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Comment #1 posted by Mel on April 21, 2000 at 12:16:43 PT:
hey
if you ever get that recipe then give me a shout
Paiges Page
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