Brownie Mary (1922–1999) — "They Can Go Fuck Themselves in Macy's Window"

Mary Jane Rathbun was a troublemaker from the start. At 13, she struck a nun who was caning a student. She worked as a union organizer in the miners' camps. She was active in the abortion rights movement in the 1940s, decades before Roe v. Wade. She spent years as an IHOP waitress. Her daughter Peggy was killed by a drunk driver. By the time San Francisco's AIDS epidemic brought her to the center of cannabis history, she had already lived several lives worth of defiance.

The brownies

Rathbun began baking cannabis brownies in the 1970s, posting advertisements on Castro District bulletin boards. The brownies were a side enterprise — a retired waitress supplementing her income in the manner of the neighborhood. What turned a cottage bakery into a humanitarian operation was the AIDS epidemic.

First arrest

The community service assignment changed her life. She was placed at the Shanti Project, a San Francisco organization providing support to people with AIDS. She then began volunteering at Ward 86 — San Francisco General Hospital's dedicated AIDS ward, the first of its kind in the country.

Ward 86

At Ward 86, Rathbun witnessed what the AIDS epidemic was doing to young men — the wasting, the nausea, the inability to eat, the slow dying. She started baking brownies for the patients. Not a few brownies. Hundreds of brownies per week, delivered to AIDS patients throughout San Francisco. She baked on a scale that would qualify as manufacturing under drug laws, and she did it openly, as a volunteer, because the patients were starving and the brownies helped them eat.

San Francisco General Hospital named her Volunteer of the Year in 1986.

Second arrest

If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS, they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window.

Mary Jane Rathbun, following her second arrest, 1992

The quote is the most famous statement in cannabis activism. It captures everything about Rathbun in a single sentence — the profanity, the defiance, the maternal protectiveness toward people who were not her children but whom she claimed as her kids.

The Buyers Club and the cookbook

Rathbun co-founded the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club with Dennis Peron, providing the operational backbone of brownie production for the organization that would serve more than 8,000 medical cannabis patients.

In 1993, she published a cookbook. It contained no actual cannabis brownie recipe. Rathbun said she would share the recipe when cannabis was legal: "When and if they legalize it, I'll sell my brownie recipe to Betty Crocker."

Death

Rathbun did not live to see Proposition 215 fully implemented, let alone California's legalization of adult use in 2016. She did not sell her recipe to Betty Crocker. The recipe died with her, as she had always said it might.

Legacy

In 2019, California passed Senate Bill 34, the Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary Act, which provides tax exemptions for cannabis donated to medical patients. The law honors the principle that both Peron and Rathbun spent their lives fighting for — that cannabis for sick people should be available as medicine, not as a commercial product with a tax markup.

Rathbun's significance in cannabis history is straightforward. She was not a strategist, a lawyer, or a politician. She was a grandmother who baked brownies for dying young men because they were hungry and the brownies helped. She did this openly, in defiance of the law, and when the law came for her she told it to go fuck itself in Macy's window. The moral clarity of her position — sick people need medicine, and baking it is the right thing to do — proved more powerful than the legal apparatus that tried to stop her.