[4] Her arrests generated interest in the medical community and motivated researchers to propose one of the first clinical trials to study the effects of cannabinoids in HIV-infected adults.
[7] During World War II, she moved to San Francisco, California, where she met a man at a United Service Organization (USO) dance.
[6] She later moved to Reno, Nevada, but after Peggy was killed by a drunk driver[8] in a car accident in the early 1970s, Rathbun returned to San Francisco.
[17] According to Peron: Those first 500 hours she worked at a variety of places, from the gay thrift store to the Shanti project, doing her community service in record time—60 days.
Although no longer obligated to do community service, she continued her work for St. Martin de Pores soup kitchen until 1982, when she joined the Shanti project, which was responding to the demands of the emerging AIDS crises.
[19] On December 7, 1982, Rathbun was walking down Market Street carrying a bag of brownies when she by chance met one of the officers who had originally arrested her in 1981.
[24] Author Carol Pogash profiled Rathbun's volunteer work at SFGH in her book, As Real As It Gets: The Life of a Hospital at the Center of the AIDS Epidemic (1992).
[26] Multiple studies had demonstrated that cannabis could help with nausea and the loss of appetite suffered by patients undergoing therapy for diseases like cancer and AIDS.
Classified under Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970 as a drug that "has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States", medicinal users of cannabis were subject to arrest.
The Sonoma County district attorney's office attempted to prosecute her in People v. Rathbun, bringing her case international media coverage.
According to Kent, Rathbun "was able to testify that her deliveries were made to assist others in need, not to advance individual greed, that the nobility of her actions outweighed the reprehensibleness of her offense according to the law.
The group delivered a letter to James O. Mason, head of the United States Public Health Service, requesting that people with AIDS receive immediate access to cannabis.
[36] The Carter administration first established the Compassionate IND program in 1976 when Robert C. Randall successfully argued a medical necessity defense in United States v.
[27][37] In addition to cancelling Compassionate IND, Mason made controversial comments about the program, arguing, among other things, that people with AIDS who used cannabis "might be less likely to practice safe ... sexual behavior."
[38] In 1996, she and Peron campaigned on behalf of California Proposition 215,[16] a statewide voter initiative that would allow patients to possess and cultivate cannabis for personal medical use with the recommendation of a physician.
"[40] Jane Meredith Adams of The Dallas Morning News observed that "four-letter words are an essential part of the vocabulary of Brownie Mary.
[9] On April 17, 300 people, including her friend, district attorney Terence Hallinan, attended a candlelight vigil held in her honor in the Castro.
Hallinan told a crowd of several hundred people gathered at her memorial that she was a hero who will "one day be remembered as the Florence Nightingale of the medical marijuana movement.
[44] Rathbun and her court case in 1992 became, according to Jane Meredith Adams of The Dallas Morning News, "a cause célèbre for those fighting to legalize marijuana for medical use...a heroine to people with AIDS and cancer" and others.
[24] English news magazine The Economist attributed Rathbun's efforts at direct action on the issue to the change in electoral support for medical cannabis in the United States: "In 1996 California eased its law on the use of marijuana.
[31] Inspired by Rathbun's arrest, Abrams and Doblin collaborated to develop a protocol to test the effects of cannabis on appetite and body weight.
[47] Five years later, after two of their proposed studies were rejected by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), their third research protocol, "Short-Term Effects of Cannabinoids in Patients with HIV-1 Infection", was finally approved in 1997.