I’m floored to learn that HOME BAKED won the 2020 Golden Poppy for nonfiction! Recent recipients include Julia Flynn Siler and Michael Pollan, so I’m in ridiculously fine company. In normal times, this would have involved a fancy lunch, a special dress, and shaky hands. But it’s 2020 so I’m chomping on Krispy Kreme delivery…
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A family of deer exploded out of the forest. I must have been 6, squatting in the dirt driveway with my model horses as the animals dodged around me, eyes bulging. Then a helicopter emerged from behind the trees, its body like a giant insect, loud as a machine gun. It hovered low overhead, sending debris whirling into my face. My mom rushed out of the house and pulled me close to her body. The chopper moved on toward the next ranch.
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On one of her monthly brownie runs, my mom caught her first glimpse of the monster coming our way.
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In the new memoir, Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco, writer Alia Volz tells the story of her mother’s 1970s cannabis edibles business, which sold around 10,000 illegal pot brownies every month throughout San Francisco.
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“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.”
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A ‘Home Baked’ Childhood: When The Family Business Is Marijuana Brownies
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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.
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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.
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Learn how to make 1970s-style marijuana brownies.
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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.
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