VALERIE CORRAL--WAMM

Valerie Corral occasionally counsels officials in cities throughout California on how best to implement and abide
by Prop. 215. She recommends that medical marijuana collectives operate openly and, as WAMM has done, work with law enforcement officials to make sure they are operating in accordance with state law.

"It's imperative that we patients are really respectful to the law so that we can prove that we're not trying to pull the wool over the eyes of law enforcement," said Corral, an epileptic who uses marijuana to control seizures and alleviate mind-stopping headaches. "For police, their experience is still the mindset of marijuana being a gateway drug, of the horror that drugs cause in people's lives. Our job is to show that it's so much more of a medicine than it is a problem."

For Corral, WAMM is much more of a communal support group than a marijuana dispensary. For WAMM, Corral is much more of a spiritual leader than a director. It is almost impossible to imagine the organization without her. She is 48 years old, about five feet tall, with an auburn pageboy, a collection of tiny gold hoops in her left ear, and Cher's cheekbones. In part, she provides the public face Of WAMM: She speaks to politicians, was appointed to the California Attorney General's task force on Prop. 215, testifies at hearings on medical marijuana, and organizes memorials for WAMM members. She is also the resident Best Friend and therapist at WAMM. Unsolicited, members would come up to me and call her their angel or savior. But Corral quickly points out that she has lots of help behind the scenes. Her husband of 22 years, Mike, a slim man with a shaved head, wide smile, and thick dark eyebrows, grows and cultivates the marijuana WAMM gives away in a garden that has become a kind of sacred place for the collective. 

The Corrals are expert growers, having started more than 25 years ago following a freak car accident that left Valerie wracked by seizures. The accident happened in 1973, when she was 20. She was near Reno, the passenger in a Volkswagen Beetle being driven by her friend. "I could see an old plane in the distance," Corral recalled. "It was flying very low as it came near. We thought it maybe had to make an emergency landing." The plane flew by, then, seemingly lost, looped around and roared back toward them. The torque of the plane caused the VW to cartwheel. Corral's friend shattered the left side of her body; Corral suffered severe brain trauma, leading to blackouts and epileptic seizures, up to five a day.

For more than two years, Corral walked around in a sedated stupor. Hooked on Percodan, Valium, and Mysoline, she was obsessed with changing medications and trying different dosages to control her seizures. By then, she was living with Mike, who had become her caretaker. He found an article about how marijuana helped control seizures in laboratory animals and procured some for Valerie. "That changed our lives," she said, sitting in her living room in a rare moment of quiet, with Mike by her side. "I would take marijuana and the seizures diminished. By 1977, I was seizure free." She still suffers migraine headaches and, to prevent seizures and control nausea, smokes marijuana regularly, although not daily.

The Corrals bought their first piece of property in the Santa Cruz mountains with part of the $40,000 insurance settlement she eventually received from her accident and began growing marijuana in an organic garden. Eventually, they began giving some of it away to people they knew who were dying of cancer. Luckily for WAMM, the couple has few expenses. The Corrals own their own home, and a second piece of property and some stock market investments provide their income. A modest lifestyle-a blue-jeans wardrobe and a house filled with a cozy mishmash of old furniture-allows them to devote themselves to WAMM full-time.

In 1992, the local sheriff arrested the Corrals on felony charges for cultivating five marijuana plants in their front yard. The district attorney vowed to seek the maximum penalty for the crime: three years in state prison. Instead, all charges were dropped when the district attorney decided that no jury would convict them. A year later, they were arrested again. The highly publicized arrests prompted a flood of calls from people who wanted to use marijuana for their illnesses. The Corrals began working as advocates for medical marijuana and started WAMM that year.

"You have a car accident and you think you get a brain trauma out of it," Valerie said, "and instead, it becomes this wonderful opportunity to meet people at the most crucial time in their lives." She has watched more than 80 members of WAMM die over the years. Many more, given the nature of the members' illnesses, will die over the next few years. But she firmly believes that WAMM enhances the quality and longevity of sick people's lives, and not just because of the marijuana. Members become friends, almost like family. Two members who met at the Tuesday meetings got married last summer. Some have become outspoken advocates of medical marijuana in their own right. "One of the great things about WAMM is that it puts patients in charge of their health care," Valerie said. "I just hope that when the drug companies and federal government find a way to make money off of medical marijuana, we'll still be here."

On a Sunday afternoon in October the Corrals and about a dozen other WAMM members began the happy task of harvesting the marijuana plants that will supply the club for 2001. The air on the property, which is perched on a secluded cliff overlooking the Pacific, was redolent with the pungent-sweet scent of marijuana. Mike Corral and George Hanamoto, a 66-year-old glaucoma patient, cut down marijuana plants in the fenced-in garden. The other WAMM members sat in a circle under a tarp, trimming the plants to make it easier to harvest the buds during drying.

Five of the members present had AIDS. Two had breast cancer. One had colon cancer. A young man who brought his brother along was suffering from lupus. Suzanne Peterson, a pretty 42-yearold and mother of three teenage sons, who had been disabled by a severe case of post-polio syndrome, trimmed plants from a wheelchair. Half a dozen dogs, two of them belonging to the Corrals, wandered around the group. Members drank beer and soda and munched potato chips, chatting about nothing in particular. It felt like a garden party, which in a way it was.

"I love WAMM and this garden," said Hanamoto during a break from his cutting. Once a straight-and-narrow television repairman, he now wears his hair in a long ponytail. A white undershirt revealed a surprisingly taut physique. "WAMM changed me," he said. "I feel like I'm doing something in my life." He is now the garden coordinator, a kind of deputy to Mike Corral, and spends Sundays in the garden with his wife, Jean. "We speak about my using marijuana openly a lot, to everyone we know,' he said. "I try to put it to people that people who smoke marijuana are not brain-dead." Marijuana, he said, has relieved the pressure in his eyes from glaucoma. "About two years after I started using it, a doctor said the glaucoma was gone," he
said.

Mike, who was nearly shrouded by plants, said he was well aware of the government's dismissal of the benefits of marijuana for glaucoma and other ailments. But countering the official doubt comes easily after his 25 years of research, experimentation, and growing, he said. "There are 462 molecules in marijuana," he said with a wry smile, "so there's a long way to go before this is fully investigated."

For several years his wife has assiduously been documenting the type and amount of marijuana WAMM members use to test the effectiveness not only of the strain of the plant used but also of the method of ingestion. Members take the herb in muffins-though many complain that this way makes the drug too strong-as well as in Mother's Milk, in cigarettes, or in a tincture added to food or drink. Mike uses the responses from members to experiment with different marijuana plant varieties.

"We're working with pure indica strains, pure sativa strains, and hybrids," he said. "We're growing more indica this year than the sativa because the membership prefers it for pain." He looked around the garden, where the plants bloomed fat and tall. "I can tell this is going to be a vintage year for purple indica," he said, gazing like a proud papa at a bush about six feet high.

Valerie Corral, in overalls and sneakers, tiptoed into the garden to take a look. She is prone to smiling, which she did automatically when she saw Mike among the flourishing plants. She squeezed his hand and kissed him. "This garden," she said, "is beautiful."