Where to get pot brownies

The chocolate was more appealing. As a reward for keeping my fingers out of the spiked batter, my parents often made a pan of kid-friendly brownies for me.

After my parents divorced when I was nine, I started helping my mom bake. I can still see my mom splattered with chocolate, eyebrows scrunched with laughter, eyes gleaming. Thinking back on it, I wonder if we were messier than strictly necessary. Maybe we went overboard because we needed to laugh. Recently, someone posted a lovely tribute to Brownie Mary in a nostalgic Facebook group.

A long comment thread followed. People shared memories of Mary, her kindness, her delicious ganja treats. She had that storefront in the Mission, and every Friday we would gather a group, and everyone would grab a dozen. The first and best edibles ever, and they were pretty affordable as I recall too, I think 20 or 25 a dozen!! The bags used to have cute sayings on them too, I may have one in storage. RIP Mary. I decided to respond only because her memory is so specific and my mom is not dead.

The commenter seemed dubious. What was the last message printed on the paper bags when they closed? Megon Dee is a cannabis chef, consultant, and educator, as well as a recently certified doula, who founded Oracle Wellness Co.

Coreen Carroll is a chef and co-founder with husband Ryan Bush of the Cannaisseur Series , the longest-running culinary cannabis event series in the world. A Touch of Evil, which came out in , was an example of the anti-marijuana hysteria and racism of the time.

Thanks, as always, to Nicky's husband Geoff Manaugh for functioning as a living movie reference encyclopedia for Gastropod! Allen Ginsberg, as we mention in the episode, was an early advocate of cannabis legalization. Photograph by Benedict J Fernandez, source: allenginsberg. For a transcript of the show, please click here. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors. Once more unto the breach for you, dear listeners. This, of course, is Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

This is the Gastropod episode—actually episodes—all about weed. The market grew by 60 percent to more than a billion dollars. The whole business of cannabis is poised for a take-off. But why eat your cannabis when you can smoke it—does digesting rather than inhaling do something different to your high? Does cannabis contribute anything to your overall gastronomic experience?

And why are pot brownies the most famous edible of all? So, is it dangerous, or not? Plus news you can use: we are going to figure out whether cannabis extracts, which are now in everything from seltzer to yogurt—do they do even one tenth of all the things they claim?

This episode was made possible thanks to generous support from the Alfred P. And then something dramatic happened. The crumple zone is what we now call the Himalayas. And the cannabis plants that were growing in that zone got really, really high. TWILLEY: This difference is both topographical and literal: the cannabis that grew in the mountainous regions started producing THC, which for the uninitiated is the chemical in cannabis that gets you high.

It appears to serve as kind of a sunscreen. They became what we know as hemp: source of cloth, rope, and disgusting health foods. GRABER: Cannabis grew really easily in a lot of different environments, especially ones we disturbed to build settlements—it was literally a weed. And so a really long time ago, as long as maybe 12, years ago, people figured out ways to use it.

DUVALL: It appears for both populations, initially, people used it for the seeds, which are edible—you can buy them and eat them nowadays. DUVALL: But it was kind of slowly replaced as people in that region and in China, kind of domesticated and started using other plants more commonly. So types of millet and sorghum kind of displaced it.

It spread really rapidly, it made its way to Europe. But that was the lowland variety, so it was mostly used for fiber. It made really strong ropes. And then there were the hemp seeds, of course. Their cannabis was only good for hemp and seeds. But the context and kind of the subsequent history suggests that this was a cannabis-based drink. The ones I sampled in Kathmandu as a teenage backpacker were flavored with rosewater and cardamom and sugar.

In the Middle East and the Mediterranean, there was a tradition of using the rosin to make hashish edibles. DUVALL: And basically what people did with that is, THC is fat soluble, and so they would cook it in butter or some other type of oil, and then make what you want with the butter. Most of the time people made sweet foods out of it. But learning this ancient history of the plant was surprising to me—I always knew of pot as something that people smoked.

But I barely even heard of edibles until I was out of my teens. The problem was that they were missing a vital piece of technology. Now the pipes that were first used with cannabis were invented in Africa. But Africans also invented pipes, and cannabis came to Africa from the Middle East more than a thousand years ago,. So you can titrate your dose—you can sort of monitor it in real time and adjust according to how high you want to be.

TWILLEY: Do not worry, we are coming back to all the scientific ins and outs of how the effect of cannabis differs depending on whether you eat it or inhale it. It traveled across the Atlantic with enslaved people. And once it got to the Americas, more than just enslaved people found it valuable and it traveled with laborers of all sorts around the world. GRABER: Chris is focusing on laborers and enslaved people because those are the people who smoked or ate or drank pot the most.

Many, many people who worked long, grueling hours used cannabis to make their reality a little more bearable. It was cheap, it grew easily. It was easy to carry. The Portuguese brought it to Brazil, enslaved Africans brought it too, and it moved through Latin America that way.

And the British brought it to the Caribbean in the s along with their Indian laborers. This is the origin of the ganja culture in Jamaica. Ganja is actually a Hindi word for cannabis. In , the THC kind of cannabis was officially added to the U. Pharmacopeia, which is the official list of drugs that doctors can prescribe. But it never really caught on as a medical drug, in part because it was so slow to kick in compared to opioids, and anyway, by the late s, fast-acting, accurately dosable painkillers like aspirin were available.

But it seems like the first major introduction of the drug cannabis, the kind that was smoked or eaten, it happened around the time of the Mexican Revolution in about Refugees were fleeing the war, and they brought their marijuana with them. The famous general Pancho Villa—his soldiers regularly smoked cannabis for rest, relaxation, and all round mood improvement, and those soldiers were called cockroaches. Or, in Spanish, cucarachas.

Or at least so the story goes. In the Eastern half of the US, cannabis typically arrived through the ports. Dock workers and other laborers were using it, as we said, the drug has for thousands of years been used by folks with hard lives—.

He loved cannabis. Some good old-fashioned racism. So pot smoking was pretty much a thing that Black and brown people did. They are trying to get in there. You know what marijuana is…? But the anti-marijuana rhetoric in the south and in the east also had some very clearly anti-Black dog whistles in it. In addition to making people violent in general, it would cause overt sexuality and sexual violence.

Which is something white people were constantly accusing Black men of and killing them for. In Georgia at one point, a second marijuana offense of any sort, even just possession, was grounds for the death penalty.

The Beats, they were writers and artists in the s who explored spirituality and drugs and sexual liberation and so on, they were really into cannabis.

GRABER: The hippies in the s, they actually were kind of the children of the Beat movement, and they were obviously a counter-culture movement, too, and they were super into pot. They could even travel on new shiny jets—the ones we discussed in our airplane food episode—and they could go on the hippie trail in South Asia and enjoy some pot in its traditional homeland.

Hey, this is not a test. This is rock and roll! Time to rock it from the delta to the DMZ. Middle class kids, guys fighting overseas, writers and artists, everyone.

Marijuana has now become an escape for the middle class. In any metropolitan area, it is relatively easy to buy—not openly on street corners, but with the right contacts or a little discreet inquiry, the drug can be found. VOLZ: So the main enemies of the Nixon administration were anti-war protesters, and people of color, who were becoming more powerful.

And they realized that by focusing on drugs, by demonizing drugs night after night, in the news, and legislating them heavily, they could disrupt these activist groups, they could lock people up. And they did. But, by , a lot of the country felt as though those super harsh penalties for dealing, let alone possession—they were maybe kind of over the top. She is in her mid-twenties, college-educated, works for a national magazine. And that, to me, is immoral.

That makes it a big deal. Nixon decided to change that. VOLZ: And one of the first things that happened was a Blue Ribbon Commission, the Shafer Commission, was appointed with the sole purpose of proving once and for all that cannabis was dangerous to humans. And Nixon packed this commission with his drug hawk cronies, and expected a certain result. But the lead of the commission, Raymond Shafer, took his job very seriously.

And ended up consulting with dozens of scientists and doctors to try and get to the bottom of it. And much to his surprise, there was no medical evidence that cannabis was dangerous or in any way deadly.

And there was considerable evidence to suggest that it might be medicinally valuable. And he was furious. He read the first two pages and buried it. GRABER: Meanwhile, as Nixon was waiting for the results of the Shafer report, the government had passed a new Controlled Substances Act with new categories that defined just how dangerous a given drug was. And cannabis got stuck—temporarily, in theory—in category one, which is the very most dangerous type. The point of category one is that these drugs are super addictive and harmful and there is no benefit to using them at all.

More restricted than opioids, more restricted than cocaine.