It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
a thing about me is i basically never notice a wig or other kind of hairpiece in tv/movies. it has to be party city territory for me to even twig it. people will complain about characters' wigs looking bad and i will nod along but there is like a 90% chance i did not notice for a second while watching. i consider this mostly a blessing.
mixed feelings about Tolkien making people of the east and south come to Aragorn for pardon like he's actual jesus christ on judgement day, but I really appreciate that Tolkien's idea of a good king is 1) realising that the true enemy is defeated, and not making the war last longer that it needs to last 2) sending free the people who used to be on the other side of the war, but now come to you in peace 3) freeing slaves 4) giving people their land (the woses's land is their own and no-one is allowed to enter without their permission, same for the shire, rohan does not become a part of the Reunited Kingdom, slaves of mordor get land of their own)
Reading Tolkien is a continual psychic whiplash because it shows what happens when you mix 1) a sincerely held belief in the importance of kindness, compassion, unity and caring for our fellow men, versus 2) the deeply entrenched racism of a white Englishman born in a Boer Republic
The vibes are a rollercoaster from start to finish
Not that it changes the main point re: racism and imperialism in LotR, but the quote in question is (emphasis mine):
"And embassies came from many lands and peoples, from the East and the South, and from the borders of Mirkwood, and from Dunland in the west. And the King pardoned the Easterlings that had given themselves up, and sent them away free, and he made peace with the peoples of Harad; and the slaves of Mordor he released and gave to them all the lands about Lake Núrnen to be their own."
The pardon is not for the East and South at large, but for the prisoners of war, specifically those who had given themselves up and asked for mercy after the Ring had been destroyed. Sending them free without even requiring ransom is a huge hand offering, especially compared to the Gondor of old that used to keep the sons of the kings of Harad as hostages to guarantee their tribute (file under "Why Harad hates Gondor, part 27").
VERY very quick and messy, but this is Tantalus's parents pre and post spider-curse! till death do them part, or something.
minds get changed post-transformation in a similar way to bodies, which means a lot of new instincts to deal with. web-making, egg-laying, post-copulation cannibalism..... just normal spider things.
and the next generation of arachnids (who have never known being human) hatch from their eggs as dog-sized spiders. they go through several developmental stages: a swelling develops on their heads, which eventually moults off to reveal a child's torso, and from that point on they become more sapient.
before "puberty" there's nothing to distinguish a male from a female, but after their fifth moult, it's revealed! males have a blue-black colouration on their legs, whereas females are a rusty orange. the females also continue to grow, much more swiftly from that point on, until they're several times the size of their brothers.
the colour difference was based loosely on Pamphobeteus tarantulas, while the size difference is closer to black widows, so there's no one species that arachnids draw all their traits from.
one self-criticism! I do wish I'd made the final form more thoroughly 'fused', because right now it is just a grey human torso on a spider body, plus or minus a few eyes and mandibles.
I love how mutant and blended the hybrids of Bwusagi are, for instance! where it takes you a second to figure out what the fuck you're actually looking at, with the final impression being both "oh that's beautiful" and "oh that's horrific".
probably in a written format, these guys would be a lot harder to convey. it wouldn't have the same effect. but even still...... something to aspire to!
This is your semi frequent reminder that there is no official AO3 app
All those are unofficial and available on the Google play store as of August 13th 2025. They mirror AO3's content and insert ads, for which the developer gets paid by page impression (that's every time the ad appears in the fic you're reading) not just clicks.
No money goes to AO3, nor to the fic writer. It goes to the person who did the bare minimum.
Many of these apps have poorly worded or non existent privacy policies, so they may also be mining as much data as possible and selling that on to unknown third parties.
Please, just use the official AO3 site and the browser.
As a guy who does Cyber IT as a living PLEASE USE THE MAIN SITE ON THE BROWSER! Do not use unofficial apps. You are opening yourselves up to a multitude of cyber threats, especially when there is no privacy policy or agreements.
The site is mobile optimized, and you can download the fics as PDFs or epubs if you need to read offline like on a plane, there is no reason to use a third party app.
whenever i look into a historical monarch who doesn’t get talked about much and is just kind of a blank spot in my understanding of the historical narrative, 95% of the time what i find is pure white hot blistering capability. a pencil pusher for the ages. a 39 year reign with no more than three hours of sleep a night. there aren’t any good stories from his reign because he systematically caught and stopped all catastrophic good stories before they could start. you shrimply must respect it
For Jerusalem, for Spain, for Morocco, for Iran and for Iraq, for Yemen, for Egypt, for Tunisia, for Hungary, for Barcelona, for Vienna, for Sicily, for Geneva, for Portugal,
For Córdoba, for Granada, for Salonica, for Fez, for Kiev, for Lucena, for Norwich and for London, for Toledo, for Mainz, for Bilbeis, for Damascus, for Zurich, for Worms, for Brussels, for Odessa, for Hebron, for Tunis
Who will answer for every grave marker stolen and milled into paving-stone?
For every family heirloom looted and resold?
For every synagogue plundered and turned to church or mosque?
There is no family of the deceased still living there to object
How convenient it is that they all seem to have left, whether by boat or body-bag
Amena, a second-year student at PSUMNT trying to get into the highly competitive Perihelion workstudy program: Sooooooo, any chance family of crewmembers get preferential placement? Yeah, the Perihelion's security consultant is my. Uh.
Amena, realising she doesn't want to try to explain Secunit to the Dean of Students: The security consultant is my Third Mom.
[ID: Tags that say, "#amena externally: it's not in my student record??? weird. I mean I guess the legal status of mixed families can be complicated so– #amena internally: secunit is going to kill meeeee 💀🙃 oh well fuck it we ball #meanwhile whatever faculty member she's hitting up is like. #I cannot ask this student what 'mixed families' means in this context that would be such a bad look #*tries to subtly pull up the Perihelion's crew manifest* WAIT THE SECUNIT???". End ID]
I do think the right way to think about the Mirror of Galadriel is that it‘s the equivalent of an entirely home-built computer tower, with chips that are only barely legal for civilians to buy and wires that look like a rat’s nest but are actually hyperoptimized for efficiency, and a homemade OS in a coding language she invented, and cybersecurity that would make the CIA cry, and also some judiciously applied superglue and/or gorilla tape, made in their home office by someone who helped invent the internet at DARPA in the 60s.
And that a Palantir is, comparatively, a MacBook Air.
For thousands of years humanity has selectively bred chickens to have larger breasts and to have to lay eggs constantly. We did it to get more meat and per chicken, but from the perspective of the domesticated chickens they’re sorta living in a very specific fetish scenario
Every work of art says things the creator hasn’t considered, but if you’ve really thought about what you’re trying to say then generally the additional dimensions you didn’t know it had are in alignment with your purpose, whereas if you think you’re making no cultural comment at all you are actually making a LOT of cultural comments, most of which will be unflattering to you
“I don’t want to make anything with cultural dimensions. That’s why I only write within the genre that is legally sequestered away from every other kind of storytelling because of my culture’s attitude towards depictions of sex.”
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