Weed Land. Peter Hecht
sheriff nor his officers were eager to add to the media spectacle by dispersing angry pot patients. Instead, sheriff’s officers became a conduit for tense negotiations to end the standoff.
At the San Jose Federal Building, Mike and Valerie were placed in side-by-side walled cells. Mike tapped on the partition to let her know he was okay. She tapped back, signaling she was there. They communicated updates that way as they were alternately brought in and out, photographed, fingerprinted, and booked. Eventually, they heard a rustle of activity outside. Agents came in, removed both from their cells and brought them into an office.
“We’ve got a problem,” one of the DEA officers said. “There are a hundred people at the gate. They’ve got the exits blocked and we can’t leave.”
Mike Corral started to laugh.
The agents asked them to tell the crowd to stand down.
“No, take us there and we’ll diffuse the situation,” Mike said. He was feeling angry now. He wanted to go back, get in the face of the officers who had brought on this raid, put rifles to his head, and upset so many people. But that wasn’t going to happen. The DEA didn’t want to bring Mike and Val to the crowd.
At the gate, Danny Rodrigues, a San Francisco barkeep who had lived with AIDS for nearly three decades, who had survived quadruple-bypass heart surgery, let it be known to sheriff’s deputies that neither he nor the crowd would be going anywhere until Mike and Valerie were free. A sheriff’s officer relayed word to the DEA. Valerie refused agents’ requests to tell Danny to unlock the gate.
By then, the agents in San Jose had processed the couple. They knew they weren’t going to hold them. “We’re going to let you go,” they announced.
“So is this like a hostage exchange?” responded Mike Corral.
“Yeah,” one of the agents said with an anxious laugh. “Please calm things down.”
Valerie agreed to speak with Danny Rodrigues, who had been furnished with a phone by the sheriff’s department. She asked him if the media was there. She could hear people shouting in the background and feel their anger. She feared a confrontation could backfire on WAMM, could diminish public outrage over the federal raid and move the eyes of the media “away from something that was unjust.”
“Danny, tell people to calm down,” she said. “Tell everyone to let them pass—and don’t be rude.”
Rodrigues and another WAMM member took a pair of bolt cutters and cut the chain to the locked gate. At the garden, Kelly got word by radio that the DEA caravan could leave.
“Please let them go,” Rodrigues directed the crowd, his voice raw. “Don’t do anything that would create violence in any manner.”
The DEA vehicles swooped down the mountains, through the gate, and past the jeering crowd. For the moment, it was over.
Twelve days after the raid, with the marijuana crop hacked down and hauled off, WAMM members and supporters massed outside Santa Cruz City Hall, openly smoking pot and distributing a stored stash of medicine the feds had missed. Before still more television cameras, a procession of sick people, including patients in wheelchairs, passed a table, picking up marijuana muffins and cannabis tinctures. One by one, they spoke out, declaring, “I am not a criminal.” Dr. Arnold Leff, a Santa Cruz physician with a beard smothered by his walruslike mustache, took to the microphone. Leff was a former associate director of the White House Office of Drug Abuse Prevention under President Richard Nixon. He had been treating patients suffering from AIDS and HIV since 1985. Dozens of his patients found their way to WAMM. Leff became a mainstay at the organization’s downtown office, treating and counseling the sick until their photos joined the vast wall of tributes honoring the dead. Leff never visited the WAMM garden. He feared that even venturing near it might cause the DEA to come after his medical license. But he stood at city hall, where he angrily spoke to the cameras and publicly decried “an outrageous example of a government without compassion.”
Days later, Valerie and Mike Corral came to the steps of the California capitol building in Sacramento. Valerie looked out over a throng of supporters, welcoming them “to the center of the cyclone” and to a space of reflection on a militaristic raid on sick people cultivating marijuana. “I also want to welcome the DEA agents who may be here,” she said. “I want to welcome the agents behind the masks, the wardens of injustice who carry the guns that point at our heads, who cuff the ill, who steal our medicine. . . . I hope they feel what we feel. I hope they have seen what we have seen, because you can’t be brought to experience the truth without having it touch you, without having it change who you are.”
California’s top law enforcement officer, state attorney general Bill Lockyer, demanded an explanation for the federal raid. In Washington, D.C., DEA administrator Asa Hutchinson answered that the agency had appropriately enforced U.S. law against illegal marijuana cultivation and distribution. “The DEA’s responsibility is to enforce our controlled substances laws, and one of them is marijuana. Someone could stand up and say one of those marijuana plants is designed for someone who is sick, but under federal law, there’s no distinction,” Hutchinson said. But it was a PR disaster. No criminal charges were filed.
WAMM sued federal authorities over the raid. Hal Margolin signed up as one of the plaintiffs. “By God, I had to do it,” he said. The city and county of Santa Cruz joined in the lawsuit. “The DEA was out of its mind. We had wars going on and violent crime and they were raiding people in pain,” declared state senator John Vasconcellos.
Months after the raid, Vasconcellos opened hearings at the capitol to draft a new California law setting rules for the distribution of marijuana for medical purposes. Senate Bill 420—given the numeric nickname for pot—allowed patient-run “collectives” to collect money to cover costs of cultivating and distributing medical marijuana to members. Valerie and Mike Corral testified at the hearings. They thought the legislation, referred to after its passage as the Medical Marijuana Program Act, would help protect patient groups such as WAMM in cultivating marijuana and sharing the medicine. They were naive in thinking that’s what the bill would lead to. With the feds easing off, leery of another misstep, many medical marijuana providers—and speculators—saw Senate Bill 420 as safe cover to accelerate a legal cannabis market.
In 2004, U.S. District judge Jeremy Fogel issued an injunction barring future federal incursions on the WAMM site. For more than a year while the order was in effect, WAMM effectively operated America’s only federally permitted medical marijuana garden. When the order was rescinded in 2005, protesting WAMM members marched or pushed forth in wheelchairs, carrying marijuana plants in a loop along Santa Cruz’s Pacific Avenue to city hall. As the legal fight continued, their mountain garden lay barren for years. Members grew at home or on small plots, still sharing the medicine at the Tuesday meetings. Then, on October, 19, 2009, in the midst of final negotiations to settle the WAMM lawsuit, Attorney General Eric Holder released a statement. He famously declared, “It will not be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers who are complying with state laws on medical marijuana.”
Holder’s message was underscored in a memo the same day by Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden. The Ogden memo declared the government would go after “illegal drug manufacturing and trafficking” and “commercial enterprises that unlawfully market and sell marijuana for profit”—but not “individuals with cancer or other serious illnesses . . . or those caregivers in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state law.” The Justice Department contended that the memo’s assurances made moot WAMM’s lawsuit against the DEA and the government. In January 2010, the Ogden memo was attached to the settlement in the case—in which WAMM reserved its right to refile its suit if it were ever targeted again.
The Ogden memo, which made no mention of “dispensaries” or “marijuana stores,” was widely greeted as a green light for state-permitted medical cannabis commerce. It accelerated the pace of cash registers ringing up transactions in a wild California marijuana market