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."