Mary Lynn (ML) Mathre, RN, MSN, CARN is the President and Co-founder of Patients Out of Time, a national non-profit organization dedicated to educating health care professionals and the public about the therapeutic use of cannabis. She is editor of Cannabis in Medical Practice: A Legal, Historical Pharmacological Overview of the Therapeutic Use of Cannabis (1997) and co-editor of Women and Cannabis: Medicine, Science and Sociology (2002).

She received her BSN from the College of St. Teresa in Winona, MN in 1975 and began her nursing career in the US Navy Nurse Corps until 1979. Her specialty was medical surgical nursing until she returned to school and earned her master’s degree at Case Western Reserve University in 1985. She began teaching at the University of Virginia School of Nursing, but changed her focus to addictions nursing in 1987 and returned to clinical practice first on the Addictions Treatment Unit at UVA, then as the Addictions Consult Nurse for the UVA Health System and from 2004 – 2007 she was Executive Director of an opioid treatment program in Charlottesville.


Currently she is an independent addictions consultant. Ms. Mathre’s focus on medicinal cannabis began in 1985 with the completion of her graduate thesis on Disclosure of Marijuana Use to Health Care Professionals. Since then she has authored cannabis resolutions for several organizations including the Virginia Nurses Association, the National Nurses Society on Addictions (now the International Nurses Society on Addictions), and the American Public Health Association; written numerous articles and chapters on medicinal cannabis; and served as an expert witness. Ms. Mathre is a founding member and President of the newly created American Cannabis Nurses Association.