'At its height, my mom's San Francisco bakery was producing 10,000 cannabis brownies every month.'
If you haven’t heard of Sticky Fingers Brownies, here’s why: we got away with it. For more than twenty years—from the disco-mad seventies through the AIDS crisis and the dawn of medical marijuana—my mom and her collaborators produced potent, chocolatey edibles in an underground marijuana bakery, and in defiance of the law. And I grew up watching.
The baking process unfolded inside our home—a cavernous warehouse in the Mission district of San Francisco. Sunlight blasted through skylights thirty feet overhead. My mom tells me that because the warehouse was impossible to heat, she used to nurse me beside the antique oven during weekly baking marathons. These brownies were messy. Handling them tarred your hands, hence the name Sticky Fingers.
The aroma of our bakery is sharp in my mind. My folks used outdoor sinsemilla grown in secret gardens on sunbaked hillsides in Humboldt and Mendocino counties. The odor was round and earthy: notes of crushed ponderosa pine needles, redwood tree bark, algae from the lazy Eel River, dust kicked up from dirt roads. It smelled like a place. Now add butter, Baker’s chocolate, and gas from an antique oven. I’d know it anywhere.
The heart of our home was my mom’s king-size bed, nicknamed “the barge.” Longtime customers would climb aboard, nibble a brownie, and float with us for hours—unpacking relationship problems, telling stories, grieving.
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