Weed Land. Peter Hecht
medicines meant to combat them. The drugs left her feeling listless, as if she were “living under water,” she would say. Mike Corral, a son of an IBM computer technician, had quit a tech job to become a nature photographer and then started reading up on marijuana. Drawn to a medical journal article on cannabis treating seizures in rats, he urged Valerie to try marijuana. In 1986, eight years after they were married, the couple moved to the wooded sanctuary north of Santa Cruz and Mike started growing a few plants on the property. Over time, pot reduced the intensity of Valerie’s seizures—so much so that Mike soon took to leaving prerolled joints in every room of the house. He lit one and brought it to her mouth each time she got the “aura,” that blank, fearful look signaling an attack coming on. Ultimately, marijuana succeeded in nearly quashing Valerie’s seizures altogether, weaned her from prescription meds, and gave her back her life.
In 1993, local authorities raided the Corral’s five-plant garden, stirring protests from marijuana advocates. Mike Corral accepted drug treatment in lieu of prosecution for pot cultivation, only to aggravate his counselors by bringing in articles on the healing benefits of marijuana. Valerie filed California’s first-known medical necessity defense for marijuana. With her case set for trial, the Santa Cruz County district attorney abruptly dismissed charges against her. The same year, Mike and Valerie founded the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana. The Santa Cruz refuge for medicinal cultivation quickly drew in the sickest of the sick.
Area oncologists gently suggested to patients who couldn’t stomach their chemotherapy that they get in touch with WAMM. The group attracted people seeking pain relief, therapy, and fellowship in the final stages of life. Valerie Corral emerged as a nurturing caregiver and a meticulous administrator for a marijuana-growing collective that parceled out its harvest, sharing the medicine at weekly Tuesday night meetings at a rented hall in downtown Santa Cruz. Up in the mountains, Mike Corral oversaw the communal garden. He directed WAMM volunteers—patients growing their own medicine—in raising seedlings in greenhouses before the first full moon in spring, putting the plants into the ground before the summer solstice, and usually harvesting by the first full moon in fall.
The crop was a few weeks from harvest on September 5, 2002, when the DEA team moved from the lower house, where Mike Corral was handcuffed, to the guest room adjoining the upper house, where they rousted a sleeping Suzanne Pfeil.
“Get up!” the officers barked.
Trained for armed and dangerous drug criminals, they didn’t realize this suspect was a woman with a leg badly shriveled from childhood polio who used a motorized wheelchair or moved tepidly with leg braces and crutches.
“Get up!”
Pfeil fumbled to remove the respirator that helped her weakened lungs function while she slept. She tried to explain she couldn’t rise. She gestured toward the crutches and braces at the bedside, seized by a sudden fear the agents might mistake them for weapons.
“Get up!”
The officers pulled back the covers, revealing her atrophied leg. Pfeil managed to sit up enough for them to handcuff her from behind. They left her in bed with a couple of officers standing guard.
“Stay here!” one of the departing agents said as they moved in formation back out to the deck and into the house. Pfeil, a Santa Cruz watercolor artist who used marijuana to ease pain from muscle failure and damage to her nervous system, wondered where exactly they thought she might go.
The morning raid was happening a decade after 77 percent of voters in liberal Santa Cruz County passed a local initiative endorsing the use of marijuana for medical conditions. It was nearly six years after California voters approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act for Medical Marijuana. In 1996, Californians made their state the first in America to legalize marijuana as medicine in a vote driven by sympathetic images of cancer patients quelling nausea with cannabis, and AIDS sufferers keeping themselves from wasting away by boosting their appetites with weed.
Proposition 215, allowing physicians to recommend marijuana “in the treatment of cancer, anorexia, AIDS, chronic pain, spasticity, glaucoma, arthritis, migraine or any other illness for which marijuana provides relief,” would eventually give birth to an unbridled medical marijuana market. By the late 2000s, purportedly nonprofit patient “collectives” sprouted wildly in California cities and counties as retail-style medical pot stores. They raked in millions of dollars in marijuana transactions with people declaring a medical need for relief from anything from restless legs syndrome to psoriasis, sleep apnea to menopause, social anxiety to diarrhea. By early 2010, the State Board of Equalization taxation agency estimated medical marijuana dispensaries—patient networks accepting “reimbursement” for the costs of cannabis cultivation—were annually producing up to $1.3 billion in over-the-counter transactions and more than $100 million in state sales taxes. A burgeoning support industry of pot doctors, hydroponics supply stores, lawyers, property managers, and public relations specialists cashed in on the boom.
And yet, in its patient-run garden in the mountains and its modest office and lounge at a downtown Santa Cruz warehouse, there was WAMM. Mike Corral liked to say the pot-growing community of some 200 to 250 patient-members at any given time lived on as a “socialist organization trying to exist in a capitalist world.” It was more. Founded three years before Proposition 215, WAMM, with its members battling symptoms that were anything but benign, shared the crop based on medical need. Most members got their medicine for free. Others paid a fraction of what medical marijuana consumers doled out for designer weed brands at bustling dispensaries in California’s urban centers. The Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana, with a couple of office workers, modest salaries for Mike and Valerie, and a legion of patient volunteers, operated perpetually on the verge of insolvency.
People such as Harry Wain, a former Lockheed engineer with terminal pancreatic cancer, came to WAMM for companionship. He had never tried marijuana. After a while, he told Valerie Corral that the pot the community gave him “opened a portal to accept death, to engage the unknown.” He summoned her to his bedside in his final days. “Come sit with me in the exquisiteness of this moment,” he would say. “You can feel it. Exquisite. Isn’t it?” Harold Allen, a tattoo-sporting construction contractor with a roaring Harley became one of WAMM’s first members. He turned to Valerie as he surrendered to cancer and HIV-related illnesses. “Humor me, I’m dying,” he said.
Maria Lucinda “Lucy” Garcia, a Santa Cruz hairdresser and makeup artist, endured her ovarian cancer though the company of members of WAMM. She long hid her marijuana use from her teenage daughter, unable to admit pot kept her upbeat and functional. Lucy was an animated presence in the garden. She packed lunches, relaxed by making collages out of gum wrappers, and boosted the spirits of fellow members with constant banter. When she began to lose her grasp on life, WAMM members such as Dianne Dias, a breast cancer patient and former nurse, administered morphine and puffed on joints, blowing smoke over Lucy’s bed. When Lucy died, Valerie Corral dressed her in a long red gown for her funeral and did her hair and nails. Corral later adopted Lucy’s daughter, Shana Conte Garcia. Over nearly eighteen years, more than 220 WAMM members succumbed to their illnesses, with others to follow. Many had their ashes scattered on the hillside above the garden, their lives and resting places commemorated by painted stones and Buddha figurines.
On the night before the DEA raid, Corral and Pfeil sat up sipping coffee and smoking joints while sharing ideas for a WAMM bedside vigil and around-the-clock support system the group would later call its Design for Dying Project. Corral’s other houseguest, Alice Smith, a WAMM volunteer who didn’t consume marijuana, stuck with coffee as she joined in the brainstorming. Four hours later, Valerie and Alice were awoken by the commotion in Suzanne’s room. Valerie slipped out of the master bedroom, walked around a deck, and confronted the agents in the entryway.
“What are you doing in my house? Get out!”
Having just ordered Pfeil to get up, the agents told Valerie to hit the floor. She refused. Valerie sat on a bench, surrounded by hanging plants and more Buddha figures, and demanded to see the search warrant. The agents brought her facedown onto the deck. Pfeil watched from her bed as they cuffed Valerie at gunpoint. Other agents then emerged from the master bedroom, leading out Alice Smith, who was wrapped