`BROWNIE MARY' RATHBUN, BAKED FOR AIDS PATIENTS

SAN FRANCISCO - "Brownie Mary" Rathbun, the grandmotherly
activist whose arrests for distributing pot brownies to AIDS patients
built momentum for the medicinal marijuana movement, has died at 77.

Mary Jane Rathbun died at a hospital Saturday of undisclosed causes.
She had been hospitalized and in considerable pain ever since she
injured her spine in a fall in August, said her friend Larry Bittner.

Ms. Rathbun, with her frizzy gray hair, raspy voice and salty
language, became a fixture at San Francisco General Hospital in the
early days of the AIDS epidemic, preparing and delivering
marijuana-laced baked goods to sick people to relieve their nausea and
pain.

"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 was arrested three times and twice agreed to perform
hundreds of hours of community service, spending the time with AIDS
patients.

The arrests helped build support for San Francisco's Proposition P
and, later, the 1996 state initiative that made growing and using
marijuana for medicinal purposes with a doctor's permission legal
under California law.

They also prompted a $1 million study at San Francisco General into
whether marijuana really does have medicinal benefits, and whether
taking it with protease inhibitors has negative side effects, said Don
Abrams, a cancer specialist at the hospital.

"I told the nursing staff today that in many ways I consider this to
be a study dedicated to Brownie Mary," Abrams said this week. "I'm
sorry I didn't get a chance to tell her goodbye."

Ms. Rathbun had no survivors. A daughter died in a car accident in the
1970s.