by Alia Volz
In 1976, a glaucoma patient named Robert Randall smoked a joint with friends and discovered, quite by accident, that marijuana eased the ocular pressure that was blinding him at twenty-five. He soon got busted for growing four plants for personal use. In preparing his defense, Randall contacted scientists at NIDA, the DEA, and the FDA, and was appalled to learn that studies had already demonstrated marijuana’s effectiveness in fighting glaucoma. The government knew pot could help people like him. He decided to base his case on medical necessity, a defense that had never been used successfully.
Realizing that even if he won in court he’d just get busted again, Randall audaciously petitioned the government to supply his weed from its own experimental farm. And to stop them from hiding the research from other glaucoma patients, he took his story to CBS News. Amazingly, Randall’s strategy worked; the government provided him with ten joints per day for the rest of his life.
Randall’s case forced the FDA to create the Compassionate Investigational New Drug program to supply legal pot to people who could prove medical necessity. Distributing marijuana through Compassionate IND was a de facto admission that cannabis had therapeutic value—despite ongoing Schedule 1 classification. But they kept the program quiet. Moreover, the red tape was so elaborate, expensive, and exhausting to navigate that few clawed through to certification; at the program’s height, it served fifteen people.
In 1986, the FDA approved a synthetic THC capsule, marketed under the brand name Marinol, as an antiemetic for chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting; it would soon be approved for AIDS-related wasting syndrome as well. Unlike homegrown pot, synthetic THC could be patented and marketed by pharmaceutical companies. But it was not without side effects; Marinol came on like a speeding train, leaving some people too stoned and paranoid to function. (Some ongoing research suggests that other cannabinoids—like CBD—may naturally counteract the psychoactive intensity; Marinol was a pure slug of synthetic THC.) Many patients found a couple of puffs from a joint equally effective and less punishing.
Some AIDS doctors saw in marijuana a missed opportunity. First as a fellow in oncology-hematology at the UCSF Cancer Research Institute, then as assistant director of the AIDS ward at San Francisco General, Dr. Donald Abrams had been on the frontlines since the beginning of the epidemic. Abrams found AZT unimpressive. He dissuaded his own ailing lover, Mark, from taking it, though it was the only approved treatment for AIDS at the time. What Mark did do, according to Abrams, was smoke pot every day.
Abrams watched his lover outlive the other patients in three separate support groups at Davies Medical Center. When Mark died in 1989, having surpassed his prognosis by three years, Abrams was left with the impression that cannabis might have helped. At General, he’d heard the rumors about Brownie Mary sneaking pot-infused desserts onto ward 86 to fight wasting, and some of his patients admitted to smoking illegal weed to help with a variety of symptoms. He thought they could be on to something.
A couple of years later, a medical-marijuana research advocate sent a letter challenging Abrams to collaborate on a study to evaluate cannabis as a treatment for AIDS-related nausea and anorexia. He suggested that the proposal should come from “Brownie Mary’s institution.” Looking back, Abrams laughs. “As if she were the dean!”
The letter made an impression nonetheless. “I remembered Mark because he had done so well using cannabis,” Abrams says. Very little clinical research had been conducted into marijuana’s therapeutic potential, but as Abrams has written, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence of effect.”
Abrams and his collaborators secured a research grant. But to access marijuana legally, he needed approval from the FDA, the DEA, NIDA, and various other agencies. Over five years, he got the bureaucratic runaround while thousands died. At the height of his frustration, the usually unflappable doctor wrote an open letter to the director of NIDA. “You had an opportunity to do a service to the community of people living with AIDS. You and your Institute failed. In the words of the AIDS activist community: SHAME!”
Finally, the NIDA director told Abrams in person that his organization was the National Institute on Drug Abuse, not for drug abuse. NIDA’s congressional mandate didn’t allow it to support studies into marijuana’s therapeutic attributes.
It was a moment of revelation. Abrams reframed his study: instead of looking for possible benefits, he would investigate whether marijuana harmed immune-compromised patients by interfering with their ability to process protease inhibitors. That got approved in 1997. Abrams eventually concluded that smoking cannabis helped AIDS patients gain weight while showing no adverse effects on viral load or interference with other medications. In a subsequent study, he found that marijuana eased the otherwise untreatable AIDS-related neuropathy. He was only able to get there by tricking the system.
For many people with AIDS, using marijuana to treat their symptoms was common sense especially when it came to fighting nausea and stimulating appetite. Cleve Jones remembers traveling to Sacramento sometime in the early nineties to speak before the state senate in favor of compassionate marijuana. A witness from law enforcement testified that there was no conclusive evidence that cannabis was an effective appetite stimulant. Waiting to testify, Cleve rolled his eyes. “There’s a word in the English language that exists solely because of this phenomenon,” he said when his turn came. “That word, Senator, is ‘munchies.’”
Faced with bureaucratic rigidity, people with AIDS broke the law to self-medicate with marijuana. Dealers became healers.
Back in the stuffy double-wide, Mer stared up at the faux-wood ceiling and thought, What the hell am I doing here? When the school year ended, we moved back to San Francisco.
After eight years in Willits, Mer had direct access to pricey sinsemilla. Charging market rate for bud subsidized the brownies, which were still made with inexpensive shake. She didn’t give brownies away like Mary Rathbun at General Hospital, but she stuck to her 1970s prices—a dollar or two for a brownie that most people split into three or four doses.
She rented us a spacious three-bedroom flat on Fourteenth Avenue, walking distance from Golden Gate Park. It had high ceilings and hardwood floors, French doors, a sunroom, and a scrubby backyard. Mer set up her studio in the living room and began a series of impasto paintings so large that she had to stand on a ladder. In coming years, her work would begin winning awards and being shown in West Coast museums. With new freedom, she stretched more fully into herself.
We had moved seven times since leaving the warehouse. The flat on Fourteenth Avenue became home.
* * *
On Market Street one day, Mer noticed new activity in the cavernous space that had housed Castro Camera in the months leading up to Harvey’s assassination. A sheet of butcher paper taped in the window read, THIS IS THE NEW HOME OF THE NAMES PROJECT, followed by a wish list that included sewing machines, fabric, sequins, back rubs, hugs, and money. Mer ducked through the door. Inside, music competed with the thrumming of sewing machines. Bolts of bright fabric reared from bins and cascaded from shelves. This, Mer learned, was Cleve Jones’s new project, the AIDS Memorial Quilt. From then on, Mer stopped in regularly with brownies for the sewers.
Cleve had been nursing the notion of a quilt since the 1985 Milk/Moscone candlelight vigil when he’d asked the crowd to write the names of lost loved ones on their cardboard signs and tape them to the wall of the San Francisco Federal Building; the visual reminded him of a patchwork quilt. Friends teased him, dismissing the idea as too steeped in Americana. But for Cleve, wholesomeness was the point. He wanted to create an avenue for people who weren’t radicals to join the conversation about AIDS.
The project started small. But after the first viewing on the National Mall in D.C. in the fall of 1987, panels would pour in from all over the country along with invitations to display the quilt. Cleve would embark on a twenty-city national tour, bringing him into intimate contact with grieving families from all walks of life, far
beyond the Castro. “America came to know her gay children at the time of our greatest suffering,” he says. “A lot of parents discovered for the first time that their son was gay when he came home tell them that he was going to die. And some of those parents responded horribly, and those stories are often told, but most parents would never abandon their child.”
Cleve had experienced this transformation firsthand. When he came out to his family as a teenager, his own father had snarled, “What do you like best, getting fucked in the ass or sucking cock?” They didn’t speak for years after that. But when Cleve called home to say that he was sick, his dad started going to quilt displays and marches.
“People who had never knowingly been around gay people suddenly had gay people coming into their homes to care for their kids,” Cleve says. “They saw the compassion, they saw the solidarity, they saw the incredible courage, and their hearts were touched by it.”
Today, the quilt includes more than 48,000 panels from all over the globe. It was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, by which point HIV cases had been reported from every region of the world. The AIDS Memorial Quilt remains the world’s largest community art project.
Moving made the divorce feel permanent. I loved San Francisco—the salt-lick smell, foghorn serenades, everyone in leather jackets. I wanted to be there, but I wanted my dad, too.
Whenever he phoned, I’d careen around the house screeching “Daddy!” at full volume. In my new bedroom, I arranged an altar to him, decorated with photos and mementos. For visits, my mom drove me halfway to Willits and did the handoff at a roadside diner. I remember howling in the parking lot, gripping one parent with each hand and forcing them to touch.
Summer of 1987, my dad was renting a tiny loft in Willits. We played Wildlife Adventure sitting cross-legged on a braided rug that had been in our home since my earliest memories. That part is vivid: the divided furniture, records, knickknacks. The sensation of visiting objects from a childhood that had suddenly ended. How my dad’s smell grew muskier in isolation. I inhaled lungfuls of him, like taking final breaths before diving underwater.
One night, he kneeled to feed a log to the woodstove and collapsed backward. His fingers curled into claws. His eyes flashed white. Saliva bubbled from his lips. I didn’t know what to do without my mom there, how to bring him back. I hovered over his trembling body, holding my breath while he sputtered. After the seizure had passed on its own, he went to bed with a cold washcloth on his forehead. I lay awake for hours, watching shadows on the ceiling.
Maybe six months after the divorce, my dad moved in with a new woman, Ruthanne.
Ruthanne was studying to become a child and family therapist. She was tough and maternal, which clearly scratched an itch for Firefeather. She was also overweight. But she was good for him in ways my mom wasn’t. She had firm boundaries, insisting that he pursue a profession with a steady income even if it only paid minimum wage. Firefeather had become fascinated with tantric teachings about exposure to death and dying as a way of understanding life’s impermanence, so he took a job as an orderly in a nursing home. His relationship with Ruthanne would last more than twenty years.
I despised Ruthanne.
She couldn’t seem to resist practicing her therapist-in-training techniques on me. When my dad and I argued, she stepped in to mediate—which infuriated me. A few times, I came home from visiting them with a migraine and the dry heaves. An unsubtle reaction to the trauma of a broken family.
Resentments festered between my parents. Firefeather blamed Mer for taking me so far that visits meant gas money and wear and tear to his beater car. Mer blamed Firefeather for never paying child support. Either one could have pressed their issues in court, but neither did. My dad would later say that, in addition to financial and geographic obstacles, it became emotionally painful for him to see me. Our visits dwindled to two or three per year. Phone calls became infrequent.
I blamed my mom, mostly because she was available for blaming. She taught me to cuss, and I used my harsh new words on her. When rage boiled over—occasionally hers, usually mine—we’d yell and slam doors like a warring couple. After the fury passed, we’d sit on the barge and talk things out until we were ready to hug and “start the day over.” Then we’d slather microwaved popcorn in butter and nutritional yeast, and watch Night Court or ALF.
Mer sought guidance from a single parents’ support group, a private therapist, and books like The Drama of the Gifted Child. For a while, she sent me to a therapist, too. Having been conditioned since toddlerhood to dodge prying questions—especially from adults—I clamped my mouth shut, tinkered with figurines in the therapist’s sandbox, and waited for the hour to tick by. My mom tried to convince me to talk about everything except her source of income, but I couldn’t relax. The therapist finally admitted that she wasn’t getting anywhere. I dropped therapy and started riding lessons in Golden Gate Park.
Cooking, as we know, was not in my mom’s repertoire.
Sian, a longtime customer and friend, would later recall peeking into our kitchen and seeing stacks of pizza boxes. “Meridy,” he gasped. “How the fuck can you cook for your kid in here? Look at the stove, it’s all pizza boxes!”
To which she responded, “Why would I cook?”
The only thing warming in the oven were pot brownies.
At nine, I was old enough to help. Baking was my rite of passage. We did it together, giggling at our awkwardness like Lucy and Ethel. I relished the toasty kitchen, the mess, the silliness, and the fragrance of chocolate and weed amalgamating, a smell I would always associate with family.
I soon knew the steps by heart.
Melt unsalted butter in a double boiler. Dump in the powdered weed and heat slowly for thirty minutes, skimming the foam. Break bars of unsweetened chocolate and swirl them into the green butter until it’s velvety and tempting. Don’t lick your fingers; looks like chocolate fondue, tastes like hell. Crack sixteen eggs into a mixing bowl. Smile because they’re sunny. Beat together with a heap of white sugar, then pour in your chocolaty ghee. If you dunk your fingers now, it tastes delicious, but you risk salmonella poisoning. Add flour, baking powder, salt. Go to town with an electric mixer, trying not to splatter the walls; cackle when you splatter them anyway. When it looks like fresh cow poop, you’re ready to bake. Divide the batter into greased pans and slide them into the oven. Close your windows to keep the neighbors out of the loop and relish the aroma blooming in your kitchen. After fifteen minutes, pat the brownies with a spatula to arrest rising. Bake another five to ten minutes until a crispy top layer coats the molten center. Ta-da!
I was an honest kid and I knew not to eat pot brownies, so sometimes we made a pan of “straight” brownies for me. My favorite part was wrapping, the intimacy of sitting with my mom for hours, entertaining each other with stories, hands busy. Place a brownie on a square of cellophane. Fold the top down, the bottom up. Pull the sides tight so no air gets in . . .
We became more like best friends or sisters than mother and daughter. We argued, negotiated, and made decisions as a team, an army of two. There were drawbacks, of course. I lacked security and structure. I was a nine-year-old kid playing adult games.
* * *
When I started fourth grade at Sutro Elementary School in the fall of 1987, I was in for culture shock. In Willits, my schoolmates were mainly hippie spawn like me, but most Sutro kids came from conservative Asian American households. They’d grown up on cartoons and video games. Desperate to blend in, I wore black leggings, Keds, and bulky sweatshirts like the other kids. Once, a classmate invited me to play Super Mario Bros. after school. I remember being amazed by how sterile her home seemed—everything tidy and beige, no art anywhere. Her mom brought us a tray of snacks like in a sitcom. I tried to act normal, but the weirdness must have leaked out somehow. The girl’s mom later told her we couldn’t be friends. I didn’t ask why. I felt like an alien from another planet.
Schoolyard dynamics mystified me. During re
cess one day, a popular kid named Jerry called another boy a fag. “There’s nothing wrong with being gay,” I said. So Jerry ran around the tetherball court screaming that I had AIDS and was trying to give it to him. Other kids joined in—including the one Jerry had called a fag in the first place. We talked about AIDS at home, so I knew you couldn’t catch it like a cold. Jerry was an idiot, but that didn’t make it less embarrassing. I locked myself in the girls’ bathroom to read until recess ended.
At night, real fags came over, and I loved them. Sian, who had spiky platinum-blond hair and pierced eyebrows, was wickedly funny. He nicknamed me Womb Unit (Wombie for short) because he’d known my mom since she was pregnant. His lover, Abel, was shy and beautiful, and had the longest eyelashes imaginable. There was Barry the cabaret crooner and Gino the salsa deejay with his snappy tropical style. There was my mom’s new best friend, Phillip, whose infectious laugh began deep in his chest and ended in a twitter.
This was the era of the most magical barge. A world unto itself. My mom handled customers she didn’t know well in the dining room, but friends came to her bedroom and stayed for a doobie. I loved listening to their conversations and trying to laugh at the right moments. “You were this little girl with these big eyes,” Sian says about me as a nine-year-old. “Abel and I would come in and you were, like, quiet. Eyes open, just looking at everything.”
My mom’s adult friends were kind, but the children I knew seemed monstrous. When my mom tried to throw me a tenth birthday party, I sat by the front window for hours. No one came.