Weed Land. Peter Hecht

      The Way It Was Supposed to Be

      For the California medical marijuana movement, this was its siege at Wounded Knee. Early in the morning of September 5, 2002, dozens of Drug Enforcement Administration agents, camouflaged and heavily armed, surged into the Santa Cruz Mountains. Their black-windowed four-wheel-drive vehicles, followed by a U-Haul truck, rumbled into the forest and up a winding road, climbing to a crescent-shaped ridge shrouded by coastal redwoods and eucalyptus. Beneath the ridge was a terraced marijuana garden—a medicinal and spiritual refuge for the sick and dying.

      Mike Corral, cofounder and supervising gardener for the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana, had just arisen. He heard the vehicles lurch to a stop at 6:45 outside his board-and-batten cottage, which had a grooved fiberglass roof and a solar heat collector. Corral had stayed there while his wife, Valerie Corral, and two female friends had gone to a James Joyce reading in Santa Cruz by local author and philosopher Robert Anton Wilson. The women were in the upper house on the property, a rustic, angular lodge perpetually under construction. They had gone to bed after sitting up until 3 A.M. wrestling with ideas for a hospice care program for terminally ill friends who used marijuana to quiet the searing pains from cancer or AIDS as they readied for their final journeys.

      Mike Corral looked out a window to the clearing between his cottage and the WAMM garden, a flowering orchard of 167 marijuana plants, arranged with paths for wheelchairs and a welcoming sign: Love Grows Here. He saw agents bolting out with automatic weapons and then scurrying to assemble a battering ram. Corral ran to leash his Belgian sheepdog, Ebo, fearing they might shoot the dog if it were loose. He grabbed his cell phone, dialing the first five digits of Valerie’s number before the officers burst inside.

      “Where are you?” they yelled.

      They headed toward the stairs, their assault rifles leading the way. Corral moved toward the top of the staircase.

      “I’m not violent. This is medical marijuana,” he hollered. “I’ve got a phone in my hand. I’m not going to resist.”

      Shirtless and wearing a pair of sweat pants, he started down the stairs and was hit immediately with blinding floodlights. Agents grabbed him, forced him facedown at the base of the stairs, and cuffed him. Corral saw a rifle barrel inches from his left eye—and sensed another half dozen weapons trained on him.

      “Where’s Valerie?” the agents demanded.

      The DEA task force was being led by agent Patrick Kelly, a thirty-one-year-old former U.S. Marine Corps captain fresh from an assignment as an air marshal after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. On loan from the DEA, Kelly had guarded flights in and out of Washington, D.C., and the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City from would-be international terrorists. Now he was working for Group 2—the marijuana unit—in the DEA’s San Francisco office. He was soon to become California supervisor of the DEA’s Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program, charged with targeting major drug traffickers and destroying illicit gardens of sometimes tens of thousands of plants. But Kelly didn’t know that he was about to carry out the smallest raid, in plant number, of his career, or that it would trigger a backlash for the DEA for destroying a garden that alleviated the suffering of severely and terminally ill people. He didn’t fathom the political flak the agency would take for unknowingly sending armed agents to the bed of a polio patient or for arresting a husband/caregiver, Mike Corral, and his wife, Valerie, an accident victim whom the marijuana movement and the media would cast as the Mother Teresa of medicinal cannabis.

      Years earlier, Valerie had suffered head trauma in a bizarre car crash, in which a low-flying World War II–era P-51 Mustang training in the Nevada desert for an air show caused a Volkswagen Beetle she was riding in to tumble off a highway. The 1973 accident left Valerie with often uncontrollable grand mal seizures, triggering confusion, loss of muscle control, convulsions, and fainting. Mike, who married Valerie in 1978, would sometimes notice her eyes go blank in midconversation. She would touch the right side of her injured skull. Her body would shake. He would wrap his arms around her to keep her from wildly flailing or grab her before she hit the floor. A couple of times the seizures struck when they were at a restaurant. He scooped her up and carried her out.

      Valerie had been a premed student