Weed Land. Peter Hecht
smoke, enabled an explosion of medical marijuana stores, staffed by well-compensated “bud tenders” and dispensary operators. In Los Angeles, a sudden glut of hundreds of new pot shops advertised special patient “donation” rates for exotically named pot strains—such as Blue Dream or Mango OG or Granddaddy Purple—bred for maximum psychoactive and pleasurable effects. As many as fifteen thousand Californians went to work in an industry that served medical marijuana users with ailments far less profound than the poignant challenges found at WAMM. In the woods of Humboldt and Mendocino Counties on California’s northern coast, long-illicit marijuana growers sought legitimacy as medical cultivators and competed for a share of the legal market. A depressed urban district in Oakland flowered anew as an entrepreneurial medical marijuana center and as the heart of a celebrated political push for cannabis legalization beyond medical use. Proud Oakland officials anointed their city as the Silicon Valley of weed.
As California greeted a migration of people drawn by the Golden State’s medical marijuana acceptance, developments there would create a ripple effect across America, stoking both pot liberalization and cannabis commerce in other states. Medical researchers from the University of California system conducted landmark clinical studies into the medical efficacy of marijuana, revealing benefits extending well beyond symptom relief for AIDS or cancer. Defendants in medical marijuana cases, following the WAMM media model, wove sympathetic narratives to influence legal rulings and affect the politics of pot. Ultimately, a boundless medical marijuana marketplace, with opportunistic pot doctors doling out recommendations for conditions severe or benign, fueled the cannabis green rush. The market blurred the distinction between medical marijuana and marijuana destined for recreational use. It pitched medicinal healing with the pure joy of pot. It offered soothing with seduction. A law enforcement backlash percolated. New federal challenges loomed.
Just before the eighth anniversary of the DEA raid, Valerie Corral appeared on a speaker’s platform inside a circus tent behind the San Jose Convention Center. At a massive medical cannabis trade show called HempCon, she talked about the emotional power of the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana, of honoring its dead, of enduring the federal raid and waging a legal battle with the DEA. Few people filled the chairs before her to listen. At a nearby booth for a stoner magazine, Skunk, bosomy spokesmodels—“Mary” and “Jane”—signed autographs and posed for pictures. Elsewhere, pot doctors and physician assistants greeted throngs of “patients,” charging trade-show rates of fifty dollars and up for people who filled out brief questionnaires to get medical marijuana recommendations allowing them to legally use or cultivate cannabis. At a Proposition 215 patients-only sampling area, booths for retail-style marijuana dispensaries trotted out their best medicines. A line of fit-looking young people awaited admission, resembling tourists boarding a Napa Valley wine train. “I thought the WAMM consciousness would take off,” Valerie Corral told her small audience. “It didn’t. The dispensaries did.”
Despite its transformative power for the marijuana movement, the WAMM consciousness had been rendered quaint, and obsolete, by California’s fast-evolving medical marijuana industry. WAMM, and its sick and dying, engendered enduring political and social support for the use of medical cannabis. Now others reaped unanticipated rewards.
TWO
Oaksterdam
Richard Lee once found his liberation blasting down Texas highways into a roaring wind. He would brake his Suzuki Katana rice rocket to a stop at a rural airport in Pearland and, from there, unshackle himself from the limitations of earth. He climbed into his ultralight airplane. Soaring skyward over the piney woods and farmlands, snaking along the gulf shores of Galveston, he would smile at the buzzards circling and dive-bombing overhead. He would zoom beside the turkey hawks, his aerial companions, flying free.
The son of Bob and Ann Lee, Goldwater Republicans from suburban Houston who were regulars at GOP events, Richard Lee studied public relations, politics, and communications at the University of Houston. Less than a semester away from graduation, he dropped out, rejecting convention for adventure. A wiry, athletic man who could climb anything, Lee signed on as a roadie and “truss monkey” for concert-stage-lighting companies. He traveled the country, scaling scaffolding 50 to 150 feet high and navigating moving truss systems to illuminate venues for Aerosmith, Dwight Yoakum, LL Cool J, and Public Enemy. “It was like running away and joining the circus,” he recalled. “It was the life.”
But in a New Jersey warehouse, while working on lighting fixtures for an Aerosmith show, Lee’s agility failed him. He was on a catwalk just fifteen feet high when he tumbled and crashed onto the concrete floor, landing on his back. His lower spine was crushed against his tool pouch. He was conscious. Lee figured he could gather himself, shake off the embarrassment of his fluke fall, and walk away. And then he couldn’t. His spinal cord was irreparably damaged. From his waist down, nothing moved.
The man who lived for the freedom of the road, for the sensation of flight, for breathing deep in the sky, found himself on a path of pain and despair. He journeyed along a darker road—“the suicide highway,” Lee called it. He confided to his father he would kill himself if he ever found the nerve. He never did. Instead, he found escape, and relief, in marijuana. Lee read up on the medicinal effects of pot as he sought help for his pain, muscle spasms, and inability to sleep. Eventually he moved into a two-bedroom Houston cottage retrofitted with a wheelchair ramp. He converted a room to growing marijuana. His parents struggled to accept that their son was cultivating a plant they considered demon weed. “We grew up in a time when drugs were bad. We knew nothing about marijuana,” Bob Lee recalled. Their views changed when they saw him regain his will to live and—from a wheelchair—recapture his free spirit.
In 1992, Lee opened a hemp clothing store in a wood-frame house in Houston’s eclectic Montrose district. With a sense of whimsy, he called the place Legal Marijuana—the Hemp Store. It was a year before Mike and Valerie Corral founded the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz and several years after the AIDS crisis in San Francisco and a pot-dealing Vietnam veteran named Dennis Peron fueled the modern medical marijuana movement in California. By the quirk of a fateful fall, Richard Lee was destined for this cannabis revolution and the marijuana migration out west. Still, it all seemed distant from Texas, where at his Montrose hemp store Lee cheerfully answered the phone with the words “Legal Marijuana!” and parked a van emblazoned with the phrase outside the store, teasing police.
The cops checked him out and moved on. They later moved on a second time, abandoning him in an infuriating way when he needed help. Lee and a friend were carjacked outside a fast-food restaurant, forced out of their vehicle with pistols at their heads. He was left sprawled on the ground without his wheelchair. Police took fifty minutes to arrive and take a report. Then they told Lee to find his own way home.
Lee later recast the story with a political message. The cops weren’t there for him because they were too busy busting potheads and waging a fruitless war on drugs instead of serving citizens and hunting down dangerous predators. The upstart hemp products salesman began wheeling into trade shows and delivering speeches about the history of hemp and marijuana and the failures of prohibition. He was uplifted by how audiences tuned into his message. “People said, ‘Yeah, this guy isn’t just a stoner after all,’” he mused. His hemp store became a local nerve center for marijuana activism. He recruited customers to turn out at political events, including a rally by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws outside the Houston office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. While Lee supported fully legalizing marijuana for adult use regardless of medical need, the NORML rally slammed the government for ignoring the medicinal benefits of cannabis and refusing to reclassify the drug to allow its legal use by sick people.
As he publicly railed about the reefer madness of the cops and the government, the owner of Legal Marijuana went into the illegal marijuana business. At a Houston warehouse down the street from a hydroponics store where Lee used to buy lighting and growing supplies for his home garden, he converted a rented space to grow marijuana for sale. Taking cues from the NORML event, Lee cast his pot-dealing in the rhetoric of curative cannabis. He discreetly put the word out to customers at Legal Marijuana that if they showed him some medical record of ruptured discs or illnesses or nausea, he could fix them up with what they needed. For a couple of years