“The story I wanted to tell was the social history of San Francisco in the ’70s and ’80s. I wanted to talk about the AIDS crisis and the bravery I witnessed as a child, the story of medical marijuana moving from party drug to panacea, the transition from dealer to healer.”

Recording the audiobook for HOME BAKED was a huge amount of work and a ton of fun! I’m thrilled to see that The New York Times thought I did it well. You can purchase a copy at Libro.fm or anywhere books are sold.

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.

My mom had catered to San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ community since the seventies. By the mid ‘80s, HIV/AIDS was rampant. There was no cure, no effective treatment. In those days, diagnosis was considered a death sentence.

Learn how to make 1970s-style marijuana brownies.

At school, Alia Volz was a weird kid without a lot of friends. She had a secret… after school, she’d go home and help her mom make and sell weed brownies all over San Francisco. But one day, Alia discovered something about her mom’s business that turned her secret into a burden that was far more painful than she could have imagined.

I grew up in an underground cannabis bakery. During the ’70s, my family baked and delivered more than 10,000 marijuana brownies per month in San Francisco. My mom dealt brownies out of my stroller in the Castro district, with weekly stops at Harvey Milk’s campaign headquarters and the home of the singer Sylvester. Sticky Fingers Brownies began…