Sticky Fingers

A Memoir of Black-Market Medicine

Edible Hudson Valley/Edible Westchester, Summer 2019

By Alia Volz

To be clear, at this point, we were writing about hemp—the non-THC containing strain of cannabis. There were several reasons why we felt that it was important to devote an issue to weed in Edible. 1) We could see that cannabis agriculture was about to change the lives of many NYS farmers. 2) We were excited about weed as a regenerative crop that can literally remove pollutants from the soil. 3) We could smell that the legalization of recreational weed was imminent. 4) We knew that recreational weed was already hitting the underground food scene. 5) We were all for reparations made to the communities unequally prosecuted under Rockefeller Drug Laws. 6) After The Porn Issue of the previous summer, we wanted to top it.

Use The Weed Issue tag below to see some of the stories in this issue.

I grew up in a marijuana bakery at the dawn of the cannabis food industry. My mom launched Sticky Fingers Brownies in San Francisco in 1976. Every month, she and her friends churned 10,000 highly illegal pot brownies out of a tiny Wedgewood oven. Later, during the HIV/AIDS crisis, cannabis emerged as a powerful—though illegal—panacea, helpful in fighting nausea, insomnia, pain, depression, and especially the deadly anorexia known as “wasting syndrome.” I baked alongside my mom, and together we provided brownies to those suffering from the devastating disease.

The sensory elements of cannabis cooking saturated my childhood: pot plants curing on wire racks until the leaves crumbled in my fist with an autumnal crunch; hot goo tarring my fingers when I helped wrap brownies in cellophane; cash whispering through my mom’s fingers after a big weekend. We lived in constant fear of a bust.

Today, cannabusiness is a $9.7 billion industry in North America—and growing fast. Marijuana is legal for recreational use in 10 states, decriminalized for medical use in 44 states, and wholly prohibited on the federal level. The laws are contradictory and in flux.

Marijuana food has flourished amid these changes. With precision dosing and mandatory labeling, you’ll always know how many milligrams of psychoactive THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) and non-psychoactive CBD (cannabidiol) to expect from an edible. Back in the day, to quote my mom, “Every batch was a crapshoot. You never knew what you were gonna get.”

Drawing from decades of culinary refinement and horticultural advancements, modern ganja chefs offer a dizzying variety of options—from peanut butter cups and lollypops to sodas and potato chips. The use of extractions and infusions eliminates the grassy texture of old-school edibles. (No matter how many times you force ground pot through a flour sifter, the end result is still Betty Crocker crossed with cow pie.) Save for a mild herbal taste, easily blended into many flavor profiles, today’s edibles are virtually indistinguishable from “straight” food.

Still, you can’t go wrong with brownies. They’ve come a long way since the 1970s: creamier, more chocolatey, reliably dosed. And in a growing number of states, you can bake them without risking jail time.

ALIA VOLTZ is the author of the forthcoming book Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana and the Stoning of San Francisco (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Spring 2020).