Sticky Fingers Brownies: Women, Weed, and the Birth of Medical Cannabis, part 1

292. Sticky Fingers Brownies: Women, Weed, and the Birth of Medical Cannabis, part 1

[00:00:49] Alia Volz: I’d be on the playground and people would be using homophobic epithets and associating queerness with weakness. And so it’s like, oh no, that’s strength. That’s real power and real [00:01:00] strength is to be who you are, whether or not it’s acceptable to other people. That’s balls really did shape how I understand strength and how I see the world in very fundamental ways.

[00:01:14] I feel fortunate to have grown up in the community that I did even in dark times.

[00:01:21] Ellen Scanlon: Welcome to How To Do the Pot, the award-winning podcast, redefining cannabis for your life. Today. I’m your host, Ellen Scanlon.

[00:01:37] You just heard from Ali of Voles, the Portugal based author of the book, home Baked My Mom, marijuana and the Stoning of San Francisco. This is the first episode in our Webby nominated three part series before Legal Weed, the Untold story of AIDS and cannabis. This June, we are celebrating pride by honoring the [00:02:00] courage of San Francisco’s gay community during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

[00:02:06] This series shares the little known history of how a fight for survival sparked a national movement for medical cannabis. In today’s episode, you’ll meet me Voles, the woman running the largest cannabis operation in San Francisco in the 1970s and eighties called Sticky Fingers, brownies. Medi Shares, how Delivering Brownies on her regular route in the Castro, San Francisco’s largely gay neighborhood changed as she became the source of cannabis to help relieve the symptoms related to aids.

[00:02:40] Her daughter, Alia, was a child in elementary school when the epidemic began. She witnessed it all and a few years ago wrote her book, home Baked, which was nominated for a national book Critic Circle Award. It’s an amazing book that traces the roots of medical cannabis to love, [00:03:00] outrage, and a community that refused to be ignored.

[00:03:04] Through powerful, firsthand stories and rarely told history, you’ll meet the brave advocates and caregivers who brought relief, dignity, and hope to people dying from aids. Before we dive into this award-winning series, I wanna say thank you if How To Do The Pot has helped you feel more confident about cannabis or just brought a little ease to your day.

[00:03:27] I’m so glad you’re here. I put a lot of care into every episode, and if you’re enjoying the show, there’s a simple way to support it. Subscribe to my newsletter on Substack. It’s $6 a month, and your subscription helps me keep bringing you the stories, expert tips and inspiration you’ve come to expect.

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[00:04:14] Me voles moved to San Francisco in the 1970s with dreams of hippie magic and a plan to illustrate children’s books. She ended up taking over a coffee and bakery business from her friend Barb. Mary Explains how she started selling pot brownies.

[00:04:34] Meridy Volz: It started with us selling coffee on Fisherman’s Wharf. We had like breakfast bakery and then we started just doing a few hot brownies and one day Barb forgot to put the flour in the brownies.

[00:04:53] We ended up with this big pan of like chocolate mess. And we were sitting around going, what are we [00:05:00] gonna do with this? And it took maybe a half hour to realize that, oh my God, the key to a good brownie is an under baked brownie. And that’s where they started to be really good. And by Christmas that year, all the bakery had to go and it was all brownies.

[00:05:20] They made great gifts and friends of friends started buying them, and so it caught on. I remember that Christmas being insane. They couldn’t be baked fast enough for the demand. That’s how the brownie business started.

[00:05:38] Ellen Scanlon: Voles explains how the media attention on San Francisco at the time led to the growth of her mom’s business.

[00:05:46] Alia Volz: People were coming from all over the world to come out of the closet essentially and live free. And, and San Francisco had this reputation of being the place to do that. A lot of it was manufactured [00:06:00] by yellow journalism in, in a way, and panic journalism. So the summer of love. Was really manufactured by a terrible article in Time Life Magazine that was like, these kids are unattended and they’re topless, and look what’s happening.

[00:06:18] And so, you know, all the kids who wanna be topless and unattended come to San Francisco. And really the same thing happened in the early seventies with a large migration of L-G-B-T-Q people. There was an article that referred to San Francisco as the Gay capital of America. And so if you’re gay. And you’re closeted and you’re dealing with your family somewhere in suburbia, you’re like, oh, well, why don’t I get on a bus?

[00:06:41] That’s where I should go. It became true after the fact because it acted as a clarion call for so many people. So there was this huge influx, hundreds of thousands of gay and lesbian people coming to San Francisco to explore their identities. People were [00:07:00] experimenting. And love to party, and so Sticky Fingers, which my, my mom had her root in the Castro and Sticky fingers just took off.

[00:07:09] I mean, she would make hundreds of stops in a day. It was always two people who were working. She’d go into beauty salons and, and florists and cafes and dental offices, and real estate office. Just anything you could think of. Where people would buy large volumes to then distribute through their private circles of friends.

[00:07:31] And this was how this very small mom and pop, my dad was involved too. Mom and pop business became citywide extremely fast.

[00:07:40] Ellen Scanlon: Me and sticky fingers never got busted. Alia explains how they cleverly avoided police suspicion.

[00:07:48] Alia Volz: What was so clever about it was that the customers only dealt with their particular salesperson, and they only dealt with that salesperson at their own place of business.

[00:07:58] So Sticky [00:08:00] Fingers was Cheryl coming in on roller skates and gold lame on Friday afternoon to the hair salon that was sticky. Fingers, brownies, nobody associated it. With this really nondescript warehouse in the mission where the brownies were actually being produced and where we lived, they had three salespeople, normally, my mom, my dad, and and a friend of theirs.

[00:08:24] And what was kind of wild about it is that every day the three of them would dress up in theme, all three of ’em would match, and they were just wild. I mean, they’d be spandex and face pain and headdresses and weird thematic costumes. They felt that calling so much attention to themselves, you would never think that they were doing something illegal.

[00:08:47] They felt that it gave them protection. And then my mom. Rather bizarrely had this other layer of protection where I was at that point in the stroller and she would load the stroller up with brownies and take me [00:09:00] with her. So really, my earliest, earliest memories are of being on sales runs in the Castro and having just these.

[00:09:09] Vibrant, vibrant, beautiful people. Fawn over me and everyone was always so happy to see us. You know, I just have these really idyllic and kind of surreal early memories from that.

[00:09:21] Ellen Scanlon: Alia tells us about her early memories of being part of the family business.

[00:09:26] Alia Volz: I knew not to eat. The weed brownies, whoever was baking would make some that didn’t have cannabis in it.

[00:09:33] So I could have some brownies and I knew it wasn’t kid stuff and whatever, but those evenings of sitting around with my mom and her friends and it’s adult conversation. But I was allowed in and I was treated like a little adult and I absolutely loved that. So it was all about storytelling at that time with cannabis dealing as like hanging out.

[00:09:56] Right? So. People would come over and we, [00:10:00] my mom liked to, she had a big bed and she liked to hang out on her bed and we called it the barge and people would come over and barge as we called it, for hours. ’cause you could like get on the bed and float. And it was just this really caring environment that during the heavy years was also a place that people would come for solace and.

[00:10:24] Community and you know, sharing and there would be a lot of laughter.

[00:10:28] Ellen Scanlon: The 1980s in the election of Ronald Reagan brought a lot of changes to the underground cannabis industry. It was also the beginning of what would come to be known as aids.

[00:10:38] Alia Volz: Reagan took the reins in 1980 and he had come to Power on Campaign promises of cleaning up drug use, and because he came from California and California at that time, this is still in the world of outdoor growing, was a main source for high quality cannabis for the entire country.[00:11:00]

[00:11:00] And so he. He was going to make an example out of California farmers and California dealers. One of course, unintended consequence of that was that the price of high quality cannabis just went through the roof. So if you were on the dealing end of it, it became a lot more dangerous, but it also became a lot more lucrative.

[00:11:21] So that was happening on one end. And so my mom at that point, she had this direct line. To this whole community of growers who were eager to get their stuff out, and it was dangerous. And more importantly was that at this same time, hiv aids was emerging in San Francisco, and San Francisco was one of the international hotbeds for the, the early days of the disease.

[00:11:52] It hit so fast and so hard, and so many people.

[00:11:56] Ellen Scanlon: Mary felt the presence of AIDS very quickly in her [00:12:00] brownie runs in the Castro

[00:12:02] Meridy Volz: and it happened really quickly and my run being in the Castro really quickly, and I would see somebody one week and I’d see a lesion and they’d be dead by the end of the month.

[00:12:18] It was stunning, and people around them would be dead. So whole groups died. I. It seemed mainly men to me at the time, but that was mainly my clientele. It was both frightening and it was stunning. And there’d be these young, gorgeous men. Beautiful, beautiful buff, and lovely and gorgeous, and then they’d be dead.

[00:12:46] It was so fast, I think I still felt like I was invulnerable. You kind of feel that at that age, I think your [00:13:00] body feels strong and your mind feels strong, and you feel like you could do anything if you set your mind to it. I wasn’t as afraid of it as I probably should have been. Right.

[00:13:14] Ellen Scanlon: The Reagan administration’s response to AIDS was basically to ignore it.

[00:13:19] This meant communities in crisis had to figure out how to help themselves

[00:13:24] Alia Volz: with. Its kind of evangelical, right? Support bed and morality. The Reagan administration really was not super excited to take the needs of, well, first it, you know, it hit, it hit queer communities and it hit communities of drug users and Haitian immigrants were the first communities really hit hard by it.

[00:13:47] And, and the Reagan administration was not all that interested in going to bat for these groups. The pharmaceutical response. The scientific response and this being funded by the government moved very, very slowly, [00:14:00] years and years and years. And meanwhile, thousands of people are becoming, well. Hundreds of people become, thousands, become tens of thousands of infections and deaths.

[00:14:10] So it was a, it was a very dire situation and it was felt very quickly in San Francisco. It was just a death sentence for the first 15 years. And in the absence of that. People made the connection on their own that cannabis was helpful with some of the symptoms.

[00:14:28] Ellen Scanlon: Alia explains how cannabis helped relieve symptoms of aids.

[00:14:33] Alia Volz: Not gonna cure anybody, but it helped with some of the most common symptoms people were wasting from appetite, loss, and nausea. And cannabis helped with nausea. Cannabis gave you the munchies. That doesn’t take a a doctor to figure out. It takes a stoner, a terrible insomnia, depression, headaches, and there’s a whole manner of things.

[00:14:57] We know now that the endocannabinoid system [00:15:00] can be soothes and that you can have a sy systemic reaction of calming the entire system. And so cannabis became a community reaction to what really was. A public health issue and should have been handled in other ways. So Dennis and the other people he worked with, brownie Mary was hugely important.

[00:15:23] Really put everything on the line to make sure that their community would have access to at least something that would be helpful. And my mom became part of that movement pretty early on.

[00:15:34] Ellen Scanlon: Dennis Perone was one of the most important pioneers in cannabis legalization. Alia tells us more about him.

[00:15:42] Alia Volz: He was the self-proclaimed prince of pot, and he had taken it upon himself.

[00:15:47] He had made a vow to himself and he tells a story that starts in 1970 when he was put in jail for a night for possession of a joint and had a terrible time, and he promised himself that night that he [00:16:00] would spend his life working to change. The laws around cannabis, and in fact, he did spend his life doing that.

[00:16:07] As with my mom, as with a lot of the cannabis pioneers, it wasn’t medical at the beginning. It was initially about having, having a good time, being creative, and also people recognized the way that. Cannabis propaganda was racialized the way that it was being used politically, how unreasonable that was.

[00:16:29] Dennis kind of took this on really early, and he is been arrested just dozens of times and was really proud of his arrests. He sought them out. He also was a real pioneer in being a spokesperson for getting cannabis legislation on the books. He got some of the first pieces of language passed even before they had any legal bite, but expressed the will of people.

[00:16:57] He liked to get [00:17:00] busted, and my mom didn’t like getting busted, so she stayed away from actually working with him for a long time that they were friends.

[00:17:10] Ellen Scanlon: Medi shares, some of her memories of Dennis Perone.

[00:17:13] Meridy Volz: He was the gentlest of people. He was soft spoken. Very smart, very kind and determined to get pot legalized.

[00:17:26] Ellen Scanlon: You may have heard me talk about a woman named Brownie Mary. In past episodes. She was a pioneering advocate along with Dennis Perone. She was also commonly confused with Mary from Sticky Fingers. Brownie Mary distributed her brownies to patients who she called her kids at San Francisco General Hospital, despite the constant threat of arrest.

[00:17:51] Alia Volz: She was this amazing figure, this little old lady, she was so cute and she had a foul mouth and the press just loved her. She was hysterical [00:18:00] and she, like, Dennis, was perfectly fine with getting arrested to make a point, and she made her points very well and it, it ended up being. Kind of a battle fought in the press a lot of the time.

[00:18:13] What was funny about it was that she, and my mom’s name is Medi, and her name is Mary. They’re not the same age. They don’t look alike, but they both have curly hair. They’re both a little pudgy, and they both did. I. Cannabis brownies in the same neighborhood. Kind of overlapping, but like different periods of time, but sometimes it would be simultaneous.

[00:18:34] The thing was, unfortunately for Mary, she kept getting busted and it was very clear that she was also getting. Busted for my mom’s activities, which is really unfortunate for her. My mom never got busted.

[00:18:58] Ellen Scanlon: While the adults were [00:19:00] scrambling to support their friends and loved ones, Alia was a self-described outcast trying to make it through her days at school. From her viewpoint as a kid, AIDS felt more like a natural disaster than a disease. She shares a vivid memory of witnessing desperation and love while on a brownie run with her mom.

[00:19:22] Alia Volz: I have this specific memory. That’s a terrible memory in some ways also beautiful of, of going on a delivery with my mom, I would sometimes go with her and we got to a, a house and they were dying. They were so sick. It was a couple and probably a very young couple. I doubt they were even 30. There was a dying man caring for a dying man, and, and that was something that you would see a lot and they loved each other.

[00:19:54] That was the thing that really made a huge impression on me, probably the biggest [00:20:00] impression out of all of this, and it was terrible, terrible. Way to learn this, but you really saw love and compassion and bravery in the way that people would care for each other through the absolute worst case scenario.

[00:20:14] The worst thing that you could possibly imagine happening was happening. All the time the community kind of cast out to the wilds for a long time, really banded together and, and took care of one another. And I will never forget the way these men were looking at each other, how much love was there and the absolute horror of what was happening to their bodies.

[00:20:37] It was just awful. But, um, you know, my mom came and she was, she had wonderful bedside manner, not flinching a bit and brings their brownies and is making jokes and trying to uplift. And you could see that they were glad to have the brownies. It would help a little bit with the symptoms.

[00:20:58] Ellen Scanlon: Community is at [00:21:00] the center of this story and the gay community in San Francisco really supported one another.

[00:21:06] Alia Volz: Being openly gay in those times for a lot of people meant leaving their families or being rejected by their families. And it still, it still means that today for a lot of people, this element of of chosen family was really powerful and people would come together to create systems and to create families for people who didn’t have their families when they were the most.

[00:21:33] Necessary the most needed. So you had systems to deliver hot meals to people who couldn’t go outta their houses. You had organizations that arose to cover bills because people couldn’t work. You had organizations that arose to help people retain their housing as long as they could, or to house them as they died.

[00:21:53] Hospice organizations to go with people to medical appointments. In a lot of ways, like the work of people like [00:22:00] Dennis and Brownie Marion to a certain extent, my mom. It was part of that, that larger movement to try to try to take care of people.

[00:22:09] Ellen Scanlon: I was a kid living on the East coast during the AIDS crisis, and I remember there being so much fear around the disease and people who had it.

[00:22:19] None of that fear seemed to be present for Mary, and she helped Alia not to be afraid either. I asked her about bravery.

[00:22:29] Meridy Volz: It was more fearlessness than bravery. I didn’t feel frightened for myself somehow, like, oh, they’re gonna breathe on me and I’m gonna get sick. And it was never that for me. There was this horrible like angel of death kinda.

[00:22:48] Sphere and it happened so fast and it always seemed like there was one survivor in a group. ’cause they were cliques and groups, social [00:23:00] groups, and I deliver 10 dozen brownies and they’d all disperse ’em. And groups were going so fast and it always seemed there was one survivor who inherited everybody’s stuff.

[00:23:16] And in the hospitals, the only thing which gave any relief at all were brownies. And so it changed. It changed over to be not recreational. I’m sure there was still some, but there was a black cloud over the city. People were shutting down socially. The business was booming because they were so needed. It was really quite a time.

[00:23:48] It was overall frightening for humanity, but I never sort of felt, oh, I’m going to get AIDS and die. I never felt that. I just felt [00:24:00] like I can be of some help. I mean, how could you not? It was the least we could do. Is that.

[00:24:09] Ellen Scanlon: Looking back, Alia feels a great sense of sadness and a lot of gratitude for having seen such courage in her community.

[00:24:19] Alia Volz: I always come back to how as a child, and even at the time, I was aware that I was very privileged. To witness, to partake in, to be around true courage and and true compassion. The real deal. Absolutely real deal. And in the days before anyone knew how it was transmitted, there were medical professionals who were afraid to go into rooms with people with aids.

[00:24:54] There was a lot of fear around it. And then there were people who just. We’re going to [00:25:00] love each other and care for each other no matter what, and that, that to me is overwhelmingly powerful. The strongest people I’ve I’ve ever had the honor to know,

[00:25:12] Ellen Scanlon: the gay community was in a unique position at that time, having spent the previous decade fighting for gay rights over those years, they had honed their skills in organizing and advocating effectively for their cause.

[00:25:28] Alia Volz: It was this confluence of events, of, of situations where you had in the LGBTQ plus community, you already had a community that was mobilized to fight for its rights because the gay liberation movement, as it was called in those days, was a really a creature of the seventies. Bleeding a little into both directions, but it, it was a seventies thing and, and Harvey Milk had been elected in 77 and shot in 78.

[00:25:55] Right. And there was a lot of protest and a lot of [00:26:00] mobilization that had already happened around that. And I think that’s part of it. When AIDS hit, you had a generation of people who already believed in standing up for themselves. In a way that is not, I think, native or natural to all generations. Right?

[00:26:19] So they’re already used to. Organizing phone trees taken to the streets getting arrested. It was old hat. A lot of people did. I think were went really seamlessly from protesting the Vietnam War to fighting for gay rights, to fighting for the rights of people living with aids. And cannabis folded into that.

[00:26:44] It was this progression and yes, it was absolutely about love, but it, it really was also about desperation. It was out of necessity, people were dying. The access to cannabis folded in with ACT Up, which was a really powerful [00:27:00] organization.

[00:27:01] Ellen Scanlon: Act Up was a grassroots political organization that started in New York City in the 1980s and worked to end the AIDS pandemic.

[00:27:10] Act Up pushed hard for faster access to experimental medications, including cannabis to support dying patients.

[00:27:19] Alia Volz: Very dramatic demonstrations to, to draw attention to the needs of, of people with aids. And they focused on getting early access to experimental meds because the problem was that medications were being developed to approach AIDS related symptoms in different ways, but they could get hung up in FDA testing for years and years and years.

[00:27:42] And of course we want the FDA to test medications, but they made the argument that if people are dying, it doesn’t matter because they’re gonna die before you find out whether this medication is safe for them. And, and cannabis became part of that being viewed as an [00:28:00] experimental drug because part of the runaround that the US government.

[00:28:05] Would give to people who were already asking for cannabis legalization outside of the realm of aids? Was that it? It couldn’t be tested on human subjects because it was classified as a drug that had no medical use. The circular logic was that, you know, it’s not safe to test because we know it doesn’t have medical use because we haven’t tested it because it’s not, you know, and it, it goes on and on and act up.

[00:28:31] Very successfully, a lot of times and very passionately made the argument that in, in the case of people who had a a fatal diagnosis, they should be able to decide whether they wanted to take a risk. The wild thing in the case of cannabis was that the argument had already been successfully made in court that cannabis had medicinal properties for certain things.

[00:28:59] Ellen Scanlon: In the [00:29:00] 1970s, there had been federally funded research showing that cannabis had medicinal uses. Yet this information was largely buried.

[00:29:09] Alia Volz: The first person to successfully win this lawsuit was a guy named Robert Randall who had glaucoma, and um, he was absolutely horrified to find that, that in federally funded testing, it had already been shown.

[00:29:24] I. That cannabis could help with glaucoma, but this was being kept under reps and there’s no way to access it. So we sued the government for access and won amazingly. This is in 76, and from then on the US government. Grew and provided him with 10 joints a day for the rest of his life. So there was a program that was tacitly admitting that cannabis had medicinal properties, even as it was still scheduled as a drug that had no medicinal properties.

[00:29:56] So the, there’s this really infuriating logic and I feel [00:30:00] like it just would’ve gone on indefinitely, if not for the absolute fury and desperation of people who are dying of aids. It would not take no for an answer.

[00:30:10] Ellen Scanlon: In 1996, California became the first state to legalize cannabis for compassionate use.

[00:30:18] This legislation exempted certain patients and their primary caregivers from criminal liability under state law.

[00:30:26] Alia Volz: That enabled people to get their cannabis at a buyer’s club if they had medical permission. And it was imperfect. It wasn’t a smooth course, but that was the beginning of, of legal access. And this was, you know, Dennis and other people finally getting this project through.

[00:30:45] So when that happened was when my mom started to step away.

[00:30:50] Ellen Scanlon: The Bay Area Reporter, a gay magazine printed weekly obituaries, sometimes pushing the thickness of the magazine into phone [00:31:00] book territory. One beautiful day in 1998, the front page had a huge all caps headline, no obits. It was the first time in over 10 years that there were no deaths to report.

[00:31:17] This was also the beginning of the end for me, and Sticky Fingers, brownies, she was ready to retire and she moved to Mexico.

[00:31:27] Alia Volz: She never went back to dealing, so for her it was like, by that point the city was full of ghosts and she had done her part.

[00:31:34] Ellen Scanlon: As time went on, Alia felt she had a role to play in sharing the story of this remarkable time.

[00:31:42] Alia Volz: I remember seeing that very little of the conversation that was being had around recreational use and legalization in general and what the industry would look like post legalization. There was almost no. Really thought or acknowledgement [00:32:00] given to what had come before, and hundreds of thousands of people who had lost their lives prior to medical cannabis becoming accessible during the AIDS crisis and how those two things were intertwined and having grown up in that world, it, it, it bothered me.

[00:32:18] I felt like there was a debt of remembrance that was not being paid, and so I, I thought I had this little piece of the puzzle that I could put into place. I feel serious about it. I feel like it’s about these impossible odds and what happens when a community comes together to, to take care of each other and to get what they need.

[00:32:37] You know? I just felt like there was something so, so essential and beautiful, and deep and hard about that.

[00:32:44] Ellen Scanlon: Thank you for celebrating Pride with us today. It is a real honor to share the story of these pioneers, along with the fury, the courage, and the love that drove the gay community in San Francisco in the 1980s.[00:33:00]

[00:33:00] Stay tuned for the next episode in our AIDS and cannabis series. We’ll hear from Dr. Donald Abrams, a pioneering AIDS doctor who was on the front lines of the crisis in San Francisco. Dr. Abrams shares how losing his partner to the virus inspired his years long mission to secure the first government grant to study cannabis for medical use in AIDS patients.

[00:33:27] Don’t miss it. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. We love new listeners and are here to help everyone feel confident about cannabis.

[00:33:43] Thank you for listening to How To Do The Pot. For lots more information and past episodes, visit do the pot.com. Are you one of the thousands of people who love how to do the POTS newsletter? If you’re not getting it, please sign [00:34:00] up@dothepot.com. And if you like how to do the pot, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

[00:34:05] It really helps people find the show. Thank you to writer Joanna Silver and producers Maddie Fair and Nick Petri. I’m Ellen Scanlan and stay tuned for more of how to do the pot.