Weed Land. Peter Hecht
Pfeil into an SUV to drive her there.
It was on the walk that Valerie Corral introduced herself to Patrick Kelly. She stridently started in on the operation commander about the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana and its garden that soothed the dying. Kelly was half-listening. He wanted to get her to the lower house to read her her Miranda rights and to interrogate his detainees about marijuana cultivation and the illegal distribution of a prohibited narcotic. To Kelly, he was simply there to enforce Title 21 of the 1970 U.S. Controlled Substances Act. He had a crime scene to process. He was in radio contact with agents in the garden, and with others holding Mike Corral and securing the expansive mountain property.
At the lower house, after agents moved Valerie’s handcuffs from behind her back to her front, she offered the officers tea. And every question they asked after Mirandizing her, she deflected by spinning the WAMM narrative. For hours, she talked so passionately about its healing mission to Kelly that the by-the-book DEA agent sensed the strangeness of getting lectured by a woman who came across as some sort of angel of cannabis, as “a true believer” in medical marijuana.
“I want you to remember me,” Valerie told him. “I want you to remember what happens here, that this is a garden that brings peace into people’s lives.”
“I don’t think I’ll remember you,” Kelly answered as he tried to get on with his duties.
But he would. He would also remember Mike Corral’s terraced garden. Kelly had never seen anything like it. The main stems of the marijuana plants were staked down on the ground sideways with wire hooks so that the side branches grew vertically as the plants expanded horizontally. Branches extended up and out through wide-holed netting that supported the heavy limbs bursting with marijuana buds. Single plants, giant bushes more than twelve feet high, filled a hundred square feet of ground each. It would take agents with chainsaws, machetes, and loppers several hours to take them down.
Despite the passage of Proposition 215, marijuana—medical or otherwise—remained a federal crime, with the 1970 Controlled Substances Act declaring that marijuana had no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. In the six years after the initiative’s approval, government agents raided cannabis shops serving sick patients in Oakland, Los Angeles, and West Hollywood. Marijuana-growing guru and author Ed Rosenthal spent a day in jail after agents seized plants grown for his Harm Reduction Center, a San Francisco facility serving HIV and hepatitis patients. Authorities raided the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club of Dennis Peron, who had coauthored California’s medical marijuana initiative and championed its passage by invoking the name of his lover, Jonathan West, who had died of complications from AIDS. The cases all stirred media attention. Yet it was at the garden of the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana, in the presence of the living and the dead, that a federal raid would inspire unprecedented compassion and acceptance for medicinal cannabis in California.
The word got out because of Suzanne Pfeil and her hypertension that went into overdrive. As Kelly directed questioning of the detainees at the lower house, Pfeil became light-headed. Her chest was pounding.
“I’m not well,” she told Valerie Corral.
Valerie checked her blood pressure. It was surging. Pfeil was sweaty and pale.
“May I leave?” Pfeil asked the DEA agents. They told her no.
“Well then, you need to call an ambulance. Because if I stroke out, it’s going to be bad news.”
A young agent, one of those who had stormed her bedside, looked at Pfeil with concern. She asked him to get her purse, which contained her blood pressure pills. She didn’t mention that it also had a phone. Pfeil was struck by the agent’s apparent compassion as he went to retrieve her bag. She felt sorry for him. When he gets home, she thought, he’s going to have to tell somebody he held a gun on a cripple.
Kelly decided getting an ambulance up to the remote property was not an option. He told Alice Smith, by now dressed, she could leave to drive Pfeil to the hospital. Pfeil gulped down three blood pressure pills. Her leg braces strapped on, she rode in the passenger seat as Smith navigated the narrow, pothole-ridden road out of the forest, down the mountain, and into cell phone range. Pfeil, WAMM’s vice president, had helped organize the group’s emergency “phone tree,” developed after the 1993 local raid on Mike and Valerie’s garden. The plan was to have WAMM members immediately alert the media if they were raided and call six members each to get a crowd to the site to rally public support.
Her blood pressure medication kicking in, Pfeil started dialing. She called WAMM’s lawyers, Santa Cruz attorney Ben Rice and Santa Clara University School of Law professor Gerald Uelemen. She called television stations in San Francisco and Santa Cruz. She called Americans for Safe Access, an Oakland-based advocacy group for medical marijuana patients. She called Dale Gieringer, the California director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and one of the architects of Proposition 215.
“This is an outrage,” Gieringer thundered. “This time, they’ve gone too far. This means war!”
Pfeil then summoned Harold “Hal” Margolin, a seventy-year-old Korean War veteran and a former Santa Cruz clothing manufacturer, to start the WAMM phone tree. “Oh my God, Hal, the DEA is raiding the place!” she told him. They met him at WAMM’s offices in downtown Santa Cruz to get out the next round of media calls. Pfeil never made it to the hospital. “She took advantage of my good nature,” Kelly would reflect, dryly, years later, on her role in alerting the outside world. “Imagine that.”
With the raid under way, Hal Margolin drove up to the mountain property, hoping his presence there could somehow save WAMM as it had saved him. Margolin had been a WAMM member for nearly a decade—since a disastrous spinal surgery left him in such pain that friends told him to seek out the local medical marijuana group. He was dubious about joining. He didn’t want to be involved with “a bunch of potheads.” But he went to a WAMM meeting. He then showed up for a second one. Just as he was entering the room, he collapsed from a heart attack. Members caught him before he hit the ground. They put him in a chair, bathed his face with moist towels, and got him to the hospital.
The bespectacled man with a thin white beard was the only member to reach the garden. He saw agents grinding away at the plants with chainsaws. Two armed officers sternly waved Margolin back, ordering him to retreat down the mountains. They glared at him, Margolin thought, as if they were looking at the enemy. Margolin, known around the WAMM commune for his eloquent storytelling, for his ever-wise counsel, began to cry. Years later, in intensive care after a second heart attack, a broken hip, and late-stage leukemia, Margolin recalled that the agents “came with a heavy hand to show us that we were not going to be able to do this. They were teaching us a lesson.” But the pot patients were to deliver one of their own.
Margolin dropped back to the edge of the property as dozens of WAMM members and scores of supporters swarmed to the heavy metal gate at the entrance. That’s when somebody got an idea: they closed the gate and padlocked it, locking the federal agents’ vehicles inside.
By then, the Associated Press and most every major regional newspaper and news station was on the story. Some WAMM members smoked joints, or sobbed, at the gate as supporters directed a torrent of shouts at officers near the entrance. Before television cameras and a press gathering that would turn the raid on the Santa Cruz medical marijuana patients into a national story for days afterward, they refused to allow the government convoy—and its U-Haul of seized pot—to leave. They demanded word on the fate of Mike and Valerie Corral.
Agents on-site told crowd members the couple was still on the property. But Mike and Valerie had already been transported to a federal detention facility in San Jose for arrest and processing.
At the garden, with the remaining DEA vehicles lined up in a convoy preparing to leave, Kelly got word of the clamor at the gate. The task force commander was worried. The last thing he wanted was a confrontation, with people jumping the fence and his agents having to respond. Kelly contacted the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department, which hadn’t been notified about the raid. “We need some marked units up here,” Kelly