Inside the Remote Farm That Supplies the Wo/Mens Alliance for Medical Marijuana
April 16, 2000
By Peggy Townsend, Sentinel Staff Writer
Source: Santa Cruz Sentinel
www.santa-cruz.com/
www.cannabisnews.com/
The old warplane, a P-51 Mustang, roared toward Valerie Corral on a straight stretch of Highway 395 outside Reno.
It was a beautiful spring day in 1973, the kind that makes the desert shimmer with sunlight. Corral and her girlfriend could see
the plane coming from a long way off.
It was flying so low over the asphalt that it looked like something out of a war movie.
Maybe the pilot needed to make an emergency landing, they thought. Maybe something was wrong.
So they pulled their red 65 Volkswagen bug off the highway and waited inside it.
But when the plane screamed past them with a sound like the leading edge of a hurricane, they shook their fists and cursed at
the pilot for scaring them.
What happened next astounded them and an off-duty deputy sheriff who happened to be in the area.
As the two girls pulled their VW back onto the highway, the P-51, the kind of plane credited with 4,131 ground kills during
World War II, made a looping turn and roared back after them at more than 300 mph.
"My girlfriend looked into the rear-view mirror and screamed," Corral says. "I looked up and saw the belly of the plane just
above us."
The little Volkswagen seemed to lift off the ground, then cartwheeled across the desert floor.
Both girls were thrown from the car.
Corral suffered brain injuries that left her with epilepsy so severe she had five to six grand mal seizures every day for years. Her
friend shattered most of the bones on the left side of her body.
But Corral doesnt hate the pilot who changed her life, or curse the day she decided to take that drive through the desert.
"Its interesting how something comes along and mixes life up so completely, nothing you thought before is the same," Corral
says, standing in her house that looks out over a forested canyon in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Who would have thought, for instance, that a P-51 warplane would be responsible for one day legalizing medical marijuana in
the city of Santa Cruz?
Hiding Out:
Its hard to sneak up on Valerie and Mike Corrals house.
First you have to drive a mile up a dirt road so steep your car engine rumbles like it has bronchitis.
Then there is a gate and a pair of tail-wagging dogs who set up a symphony of barks at the first sign of a stranger.
Theres a woman with a cell phone who calls ahead to let Mike and Valerie know youre coming, and a narrow dirt path that
weaves through the forest for 200 yards.
Then you walk through redwood and poison oak, along the trunk of a eucalyptus tree that fell onto the path after being struck
by lightning, and finally to a house that sinks into the side of a mountain the way a sleepy child sinks into his mothers lap.
"Hello," says Mike, waiting outside to meet you.
There is no way to arrive unnoticed, and Mike and Valerie like it that way.
Because when you grow marijuana even if its for sick people and even if there is a state law that allows you to do it there
are a lot of people youve got to worry about.
Gun-toting bandits could make off with a harvest worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on the street.
Or federal agents could drive up in vans and chop down the bright-green bushes because, according to them, its still a crime to
traffic in marijuana.
Thats what all the secrecy is for. Thats why Valerie and Mike station lookouts around their garden 24 hours a day once the
plants start to mature and stretch toward the sun.
Why they dont want anyone to know where their home is.
Because, they say, if someone took their crop, who would take care of the 225 people who come to them with breast cancer,
AIDS, arthritis and spinal cord injuries? The people who are looking for a way to ease their pain and, sometimes, the approach
of death.
"If they just arrested us, we could deal with that," says Mike, a 50-year-old with a muscular build and shaved head, who says he
doesnt smoke marijuana himself.
"But if they took our garden what are those 225 people going to do?"
How Do You Decide?
Valerie and Mikes house is perched so high up on a mountain its like sitting in the front seat of a helicopter.
The house is all angles and windows pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Theres a bedroom they added on here. A guest room under construction there. When they first came, the house was so small it
was like living in a treehouse.
The Corrals work as caretakers for the 160-acre property, so they dont pay rent. They grow most of their own food.
What little income they have comes from some land they developed with the $40,000 settlement from Valeries car crash.
This simple life is what allows them to give away a crop they could otherwise sell for $6,000-$10,000 a pound.
"Its easy to be generous when you have abundance," says Valerie, swinging her arm to take in the stunning view, the little
house.
"I have a vastly wealthy life."
Besides, the value of marijuana is not about money, but about relief. Medical marijuana should be sold as cheaply as aspirin, she
says.
The office for the Wo/Mens Alliance for Medical Marijuana, the organization that persuaded the Santa Cruz City Council to
allow medical marijuana to be grown and used under city protection, is just off the Corrals kitchen, no bigger than a walk-in
closet.
There is a plastic tub full of the weeks sharp-smelling supply of pot, rows of botanical books, and 32 messages on the
answering machine.
Valerie pushes the play button.
"Im in the last stages of liver disease," says a woman.
"Im having trouble with nausea," says a young man with testicular cancer, whose voice already sounds too old.
Valerie puts her hand up to her mouth and sighs.
Ever since the city passed the ordinance, 100 more people have called.
They all want to join WAMM.
They all want their own weekly zip-lock bag of miracles.
"Tomorrow I have to inventory and see how much we have," says Mike, who will check the amount of marijuana they have
stored for the year. "That way we can figure out how many more people we can let in."
How do you pick from among the sad stories?
How do you decide if the lady with liver disease or the man with testicular cancer gets put on the list first?
Growing Our Own Medicine
Valerie and Mike have been doing this for almost 20 years.
Their crusade began when Mike read an article in a medical journal that said marijuana could relieve epileptic seizures like the
ones Valerie got after the car crash.
In those days, Valerie was having so many seizures she couldnt be left alone. The medications prescribed by her doctor the
ones that left her feeling like she was living under water couldnt stop the electrical storms that went off in her brain five or
six times a day.
Once she walked into oncoming traffic. Another time she almost drowned in the bathtub.
Mike figured trying pot couldnt hurt, so they got a tin of bud, rolled it into neat little submarine-shaped joints, and Valerie
began to smoke them. One joint a day seemed to do it.
Within four years, she says, she was off all her medications and the seizures stopped.
So Mike stuck a few marijuana plants in the ground next to their bell peppers and tomatoes.
"We were growing our own medicine," he says.
When one of their friends became ill with cancer, they gave him a few buds to help him combat the nausea of chemotherapy.
Then they gave pot to a few more seriously ill people they knew.
Everything seemed to be going fine.
Until the cops came.
Under Arrest:
The first deputy sheriff was a nice guy.
He listened to the story of how Valerie needed the pot to stop her seizures; and even though he confiscated three plants drying
in their house, he reached into the evidence bag, grabbed a handful of pot and set it on their kitchen counter.
"Heres enough to last you until those plants come in," he said, nodding toward seven small plants hed left behind in their
garden.
The next time, the deputies werent so understanding.
In 1992 Valerie and Mike were arrested for growing five plants.
The couple decided to fight in court, arguing that Valerie needed the plants to treat her epilepsy.
Out in front of the courthouse, surrounded by television cameras, Valerie listened as the district attorney vowed to seek the
maximum penalty: three years in prison.
"My knees went weak," Valerie says. "If the cameras wouldnt have been there, I would have thrown up. Or cried."
What worried her the most was that she wouldnt be able to use marijuana in prison to control her seizures.
"I would become a prisoner of my epilepsy all over again," she says.
But Valerie won her case when the district attorney dismissed the charges a week before her trial was to begin because he said
her case met all the conditions of a "necessity" defense.
A year later she was arrested again, but the district attorney declined to prosecute her on the charges.
With the arrests behind them, the Corrals formalized their marijuana giveaways and started WAMM.
Since then, there have been no more raids.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff Mark Tracy knows where they live, but leaves them alone as long as the Corrals stick to the strict
guidelines they have set up for distributing marijuana only to the seriously ill and as long as Californias Proposition 215,
which was passed in 1996 and allows for the medical use of marijuana, stays in effect.
"I appreciate her clear separation between marijuana as a health issue as opposed to those who use it inappropriately," Tracy
says.
Hed feel differently, he says, if she was advocating the legalization of marijuana.
Still, hes concerned.
"I worry about their safety," Tracy says.
With all that pot up there, who knows what lengths someone might go to steal it? He gave the Corrals a sheriffs hot-line
number to call if it ever comes to that. Still, he worries whenever they talk publicly about their growing operation.
Not everyone agrees with Tracys hands-off policy.
Spokeswomen for both the federal Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Agency said it doesnt matter why
someone is growing marijuana.
"Federal law stipulates that growing, distributing and trafficking in marijuana is illegal," said Rogene Waite, a public
information officer for the DEA in Washington, D.C., "and we enforce that law."
Federal penalties range from five to 40 years in prison and a $2 million fine. But so far, no DEA agents have driven up the steep
road to arrest the Corrals and take their crop.
"I dont think the federal government would do it take marijuana from 200 ill people but you never know," Mike says.
Thats why he wont say exactly how many plants theyve got growing in their garden.
Former Sheriff Al Noren, whose deputies raided the Corrals crops in the 90s, scoffs at the notion of medical marijuana.
"All they want to do is smoke dope," he says. "People just want to get high and legalize it."
Hope In A Zip-Lock Bag:
There must be 100 people in the room, and the little storefront in Santa Cruz is starting to feel like a greenhouse with the heat
turned up too high.
There are people squeezed onto old vinyl couches. People lined up against the wall.
Their bodies tell their stories: women with the bald heads of chemotherapy, young men in wheelchairs, wire-thin men wasting
away from AIDS.
Valerie, 48, stands in front of the little room, dressed in green cargo pants and a Mexican shirt. One of the things she believes is
that people who are sick and dying need to connect not just walk past each other, but walk through each others lives.
So she insists on holding a meeting before volunteers hand out the baggies of pot and the marijuana muffins that sit on a
folding table in one corner of the room.
A few people bolt for the front and get their pot either too sick or too antsy to stick around but the rest listen.
The group is having an art show. One of the members was just taken to Dominican Hospital with a brain tumor. Another
member died unexpectedly a week ago.
Death is an everyday part of life here at the marijuana giveaways.
From an old green couch, Margo Karow listens.
Shes 30, with two young children and breast cancer that was diagnosed when she was pregnant with her second child.
Shes been fighting the cancer for a couple of years now, and sometimes it feels like the cancer is winning.
If it wasnt for the marijuana she gets weekly from WAMM, there would be days she couldnt get out of bed, couldnt eat,
couldnt make lunch for her 2-year-old and 7-year-old.
"It makes it more tolerable," she says. "I dont know if I could continue with everything and deal with it all, without it."
Valerie, she says, is a remarkable woman.
Everyone here has to fill out an application and bring a verified diagnosis and a recommendation for medical marijuana from
their doctor before they get their allotment. Even though the new Santa Cruz ordinance doesnt require a doctors
recommendation, WAMM has always made it part of the rules.
Volunteers check each persons name off a list before handing them their weekly package. Some get tiny plants to grow.
One man puts a $5 donation on the table before picking up his baggie of marijuana. Another lays down a $20 bill. The next
man gives nothing.
A 1999 Institute of Medicine study says marijuana can offer medical relief.
Evidence shows marijuana controls nausea, stimulates appetite and relieves pain, the report says. It also reduces anxiety.
But, the report notes, there are health risks from smoking marijuana like cancer and emphysema and for many people
there are drugs that work just as well.
But 48-year-old Kathy Nicholson doesnt believe so. She lifts up a hand that is as humped and gnarled as an old root.
Shes got arthritis, and sometimes a few hits on a joint in the middle of the night is all that allows her to sleep. Other drugs
dont make her feel as good.
"You see why I do this, the richness of the work," Valerie says later.
"I think I work with the most amazing humans. They are truly empowering."
Lifes Lessons:
At her house, Valerie sinks into a chair next to the wood stove. Behind her are dozens of marijuana plants sprouting in metal
cans on the deck this years crop.
Shes learned a lot from her life, Valerie says.
Shes learned how illness can make you stronger. How illness can become a blessing.
How marijuana can open the minds of people who are terminally ill.
Shes witnessed 100 deaths herself and says that as death approaches, many turn to face it, instead of running from it.
They court death like a lover, she says. They embrace it.
And that, she says, has been a good lesson.
Some day, she says, shed like to turn WAMM into a center for people who are dying a place where they could work, live
and heal spiritually.
Some day shed like to see medical marijuana affordable for everyone, to see death treated the way her friends treated it when
they held an old-fashioned wake for a woman who died recently, to see her study on marijuana published in a medical journal.
But right now, its time to get this years crop in the ground, to answer her phone messages, to pack up the next weeks
packages of pot.
"I have never failed to learn something from someone who is sick," Valerie says.
"I dont think I could do anything that would make me emotionally richer than this."
Published: April 16, 2000
Copyright 1999-2000, Santa Cruz County Sentinel Publishers Co.
Related Articles & Web Sites:
WAMM
www.wamm.org/
Medical Marijuana Crime in O.C. but not in Santa Cruz
www.cannabisnews.com/news...5392.shtml
Santa Cruz Pot Ordinance Allows Medical Marijuana
www.cannabisnews.com/news...5221.shtml
Santa Cruz Considers Medicinal Marijuana Ordinance
www.cannabisnews.com/news...5213.shtml
CannabisNews Medical Marijuana Articles and Archives:
www.cannabisnews.com/news...ical.shtml
google.com/search?lc=&num...isnews.com
Inside the Remote Farm That Supplies M. Marijuana
www.cannabisnews.com/news...5423.shtml
April 16, 2000
By Peggy Townsend, Sentinel Staff Writer
Source: Santa Cruz Sentinel
www.santa-cruz.com/
www.cannabisnews.com/
The old warplane, a P-51 Mustang, roared toward Valerie Corral on a straight stretch of Highway 395 outside Reno.
It was a beautiful spring day in 1973, the kind that makes the desert shimmer with sunlight. Corral and her girlfriend could see
the plane coming from a long way off.
It was flying so low over the asphalt that it looked like something out of a war movie.
Maybe the pilot needed to make an emergency landing, they thought. Maybe something was wrong.
So they pulled their red 65 Volkswagen bug off the highway and waited inside it.
But when the plane screamed past them with a sound like the leading edge of a hurricane, they shook their fists and cursed at
the pilot for scaring them.
What happened next astounded them and an off-duty deputy sheriff who happened to be in the area.
As the two girls pulled their VW back onto the highway, the P-51, the kind of plane credited with 4,131 ground kills during
World War II, made a looping turn and roared back after them at more than 300 mph.
"My girlfriend looked into the rear-view mirror and screamed," Corral says. "I looked up and saw the belly of the plane just
above us."
The little Volkswagen seemed to lift off the ground, then cartwheeled across the desert floor.
Both girls were thrown from the car.
Corral suffered brain injuries that left her with epilepsy so severe she had five to six grand mal seizures every day for years. Her
friend shattered most of the bones on the left side of her body.
But Corral doesnt hate the pilot who changed her life, or curse the day she decided to take that drive through the desert.
"Its interesting how something comes along and mixes life up so completely, nothing you thought before is the same," Corral
says, standing in her house that looks out over a forested canyon in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Who would have thought, for instance, that a P-51 warplane would be responsible for one day legalizing medical marijuana in
the city of Santa Cruz?
Hiding Out:
Its hard to sneak up on Valerie and Mike Corrals house.
First you have to drive a mile up a dirt road so steep your car engine rumbles like it has bronchitis.
Then there is a gate and a pair of tail-wagging dogs who set up a symphony of barks at the first sign of a stranger.
Theres a woman with a cell phone who calls ahead to let Mike and Valerie know youre coming, and a narrow dirt path that
weaves through the forest for 200 yards.
Then you walk through redwood and poison oak, along the trunk of a eucalyptus tree that fell onto the path after being struck
by lightning, and finally to a house that sinks into the side of a mountain the way a sleepy child sinks into his mothers lap.
"Hello," says Mike, waiting outside to meet you.
There is no way to arrive unnoticed, and Mike and Valerie like it that way.
Because when you grow marijuana even if its for sick people and even if there is a state law that allows you to do it there
are a lot of people youve got to worry about.
Gun-toting bandits could make off with a harvest worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on the street.
Or federal agents could drive up in vans and chop down the bright-green bushes because, according to them, its still a crime to
traffic in marijuana.
Thats what all the secrecy is for. Thats why Valerie and Mike station lookouts around their garden 24 hours a day once the
plants start to mature and stretch toward the sun.
Why they dont want anyone to know where their home is.
Because, they say, if someone took their crop, who would take care of the 225 people who come to them with breast cancer,
AIDS, arthritis and spinal cord injuries? The people who are looking for a way to ease their pain and, sometimes, the approach
of death.
"If they just arrested us, we could deal with that," says Mike, a 50-year-old with a muscular build and shaved head, who says he
doesnt smoke marijuana himself.
"But if they took our garden what are those 225 people going to do?"
How Do You Decide?
Valerie and Mikes house is perched so high up on a mountain its like sitting in the front seat of a helicopter.
The house is all angles and windows pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Theres a bedroom they added on here. A guest room under construction there. When they first came, the house was so small it
was like living in a treehouse.
The Corrals work as caretakers for the 160-acre property, so they dont pay rent. They grow most of their own food.
What little income they have comes from some land they developed with the $40,000 settlement from Valeries car crash.
This simple life is what allows them to give away a crop they could otherwise sell for $6,000-$10,000 a pound.
"Its easy to be generous when you have abundance," says Valerie, swinging her arm to take in the stunning view, the little
house.
"I have a vastly wealthy life."
Besides, the value of marijuana is not about money, but about relief. Medical marijuana should be sold as cheaply as aspirin, she
says.
The office for the Wo/Mens Alliance for Medical Marijuana, the organization that persuaded the Santa Cruz City Council to
allow medical marijuana to be grown and used under city protection, is just off the Corrals kitchen, no bigger than a walk-in
closet.
There is a plastic tub full of the weeks sharp-smelling supply of pot, rows of botanical books, and 32 messages on the
answering machine.
Valerie pushes the play button.
"Im in the last stages of liver disease," says a woman.
"Im having trouble with nausea," says a young man with testicular cancer, whose voice already sounds too old.
Valerie puts her hand up to her mouth and sighs.
Ever since the city passed the ordinance, 100 more people have called.
They all want to join WAMM.
They all want their own weekly zip-lock bag of miracles.
"Tomorrow I have to inventory and see how much we have," says Mike, who will check the amount of marijuana they have
stored for the year. "That way we can figure out how many more people we can let in."
How do you pick from among the sad stories?
How do you decide if the lady with liver disease or the man with testicular cancer gets put on the list first?
Growing Our Own Medicine
Valerie and Mike have been doing this for almost 20 years.
Their crusade began when Mike read an article in a medical journal that said marijuana could relieve epileptic seizures like the
ones Valerie got after the car crash.
In those days, Valerie was having so many seizures she couldnt be left alone. The medications prescribed by her doctor the
ones that left her feeling like she was living under water couldnt stop the electrical storms that went off in her brain five or
six times a day.
Once she walked into oncoming traffic. Another time she almost drowned in the bathtub.
Mike figured trying pot couldnt hurt, so they got a tin of bud, rolled it into neat little submarine-shaped joints, and Valerie
began to smoke them. One joint a day seemed to do it.
Within four years, she says, she was off all her medications and the seizures stopped.
So Mike stuck a few marijuana plants in the ground next to their bell peppers and tomatoes.
"We were growing our own medicine," he says.
When one of their friends became ill with cancer, they gave him a few buds to help him combat the nausea of chemotherapy.
Then they gave pot to a few more seriously ill people they knew.
Everything seemed to be going fine.
Until the cops came.
Under Arrest:
The first deputy sheriff was a nice guy.
He listened to the story of how Valerie needed the pot to stop her seizures; and even though he confiscated three plants drying
in their house, he reached into the evidence bag, grabbed a handful of pot and set it on their kitchen counter.
"Heres enough to last you until those plants come in," he said, nodding toward seven small plants hed left behind in their
garden.
The next time, the deputies werent so understanding.
In 1992 Valerie and Mike were arrested for growing five plants.
The couple decided to fight in court, arguing that Valerie needed the plants to treat her epilepsy.
Out in front of the courthouse, surrounded by television cameras, Valerie listened as the district attorney vowed to seek the
maximum penalty: three years in prison.
"My knees went weak," Valerie says. "If the cameras wouldnt have been there, I would have thrown up. Or cried."
What worried her the most was that she wouldnt be able to use marijuana in prison to control her seizures.
"I would become a prisoner of my epilepsy all over again," she says.
But Valerie won her case when the district attorney dismissed the charges a week before her trial was to begin because he said
her case met all the conditions of a "necessity" defense.
A year later she was arrested again, but the district attorney declined to prosecute her on the charges.
With the arrests behind them, the Corrals formalized their marijuana giveaways and started WAMM.
Since then, there have been no more raids.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff Mark Tracy knows where they live, but leaves them alone as long as the Corrals stick to the strict
guidelines they have set up for distributing marijuana only to the seriously ill and as long as Californias Proposition 215,
which was passed in 1996 and allows for the medical use of marijuana, stays in effect.
"I appreciate her clear separation between marijuana as a health issue as opposed to those who use it inappropriately," Tracy
says.
Hed feel differently, he says, if she was advocating the legalization of marijuana.
Still, hes concerned.
"I worry about their safety," Tracy says.
With all that pot up there, who knows what lengths someone might go to steal it? He gave the Corrals a sheriffs hot-line
number to call if it ever comes to that. Still, he worries whenever they talk publicly about their growing operation.
Not everyone agrees with Tracys hands-off policy.
Spokeswomen for both the federal Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Agency said it doesnt matter why
someone is growing marijuana.
"Federal law stipulates that growing, distributing and trafficking in marijuana is illegal," said Rogene Waite, a public
information officer for the DEA in Washington, D.C., "and we enforce that law."
Federal penalties range from five to 40 years in prison and a $2 million fine. But so far, no DEA agents have driven up the steep
road to arrest the Corrals and take their crop.
"I dont think the federal government would do it take marijuana from 200 ill people but you never know," Mike says.
Thats why he wont say exactly how many plants theyve got growing in their garden.
Former Sheriff Al Noren, whose deputies raided the Corrals crops in the 90s, scoffs at the notion of medical marijuana.
"All they want to do is smoke dope," he says. "People just want to get high and legalize it."
Hope In A Zip-Lock Bag:
There must be 100 people in the room, and the little storefront in Santa Cruz is starting to feel like a greenhouse with the heat
turned up too high.
There are people squeezed onto old vinyl couches. People lined up against the wall.
Their bodies tell their stories: women with the bald heads of chemotherapy, young men in wheelchairs, wire-thin men wasting
away from AIDS.
Valerie, 48, stands in front of the little room, dressed in green cargo pants and a Mexican shirt. One of the things she believes is
that people who are sick and dying need to connect not just walk past each other, but walk through each others lives.
So she insists on holding a meeting before volunteers hand out the baggies of pot and the marijuana muffins that sit on a
folding table in one corner of the room.
A few people bolt for the front and get their pot either too sick or too antsy to stick around but the rest listen.
The group is having an art show. One of the members was just taken to Dominican Hospital with a brain tumor. Another
member died unexpectedly a week ago.
Death is an everyday part of life here at the marijuana giveaways.
From an old green couch, Margo Karow listens.
Shes 30, with two young children and breast cancer that was diagnosed when she was pregnant with her second child.
Shes been fighting the cancer for a couple of years now, and sometimes it feels like the cancer is winning.
If it wasnt for the marijuana she gets weekly from WAMM, there would be days she couldnt get out of bed, couldnt eat,
couldnt make lunch for her 2-year-old and 7-year-old.
"It makes it more tolerable," she says. "I dont know if I could continue with everything and deal with it all, without it."
Valerie, she says, is a remarkable woman.
Everyone here has to fill out an application and bring a verified diagnosis and a recommendation for medical marijuana from
their doctor before they get their allotment. Even though the new Santa Cruz ordinance doesnt require a doctors
recommendation, WAMM has always made it part of the rules.
Volunteers check each persons name off a list before handing them their weekly package. Some get tiny plants to grow.
One man puts a $5 donation on the table before picking up his baggie of marijuana. Another lays down a $20 bill. The next
man gives nothing.
A 1999 Institute of Medicine study says marijuana can offer medical relief.
Evidence shows marijuana controls nausea, stimulates appetite and relieves pain, the report says. It also reduces anxiety.
But, the report notes, there are health risks from smoking marijuana like cancer and emphysema and for many people
there are drugs that work just as well.
But 48-year-old Kathy Nicholson doesnt believe so. She lifts up a hand that is as humped and gnarled as an old root.
Shes got arthritis, and sometimes a few hits on a joint in the middle of the night is all that allows her to sleep. Other drugs
dont make her feel as good.
"You see why I do this, the richness of the work," Valerie says later.
"I think I work with the most amazing humans. They are truly empowering."
Lifes Lessons:
At her house, Valerie sinks into a chair next to the wood stove. Behind her are dozens of marijuana plants sprouting in metal
cans on the deck this years crop.
Shes learned a lot from her life, Valerie says.
Shes learned how illness can make you stronger. How illness can become a blessing.
How marijuana can open the minds of people who are terminally ill.
Shes witnessed 100 deaths herself and says that as death approaches, many turn to face it, instead of running from it.
They court death like a lover, she says. They embrace it.
And that, she says, has been a good lesson.
Some day, she says, shed like to turn WAMM into a center for people who are dying a place where they could work, live
and heal spiritually.
Some day shed like to see medical marijuana affordable for everyone, to see death treated the way her friends treated it when
they held an old-fashioned wake for a woman who died recently, to see her study on marijuana published in a medical journal.
But right now, its time to get this years crop in the ground, to answer her phone messages, to pack up the next weeks
packages of pot.
"I have never failed to learn something from someone who is sick," Valerie says.
"I dont think I could do anything that would make me emotionally richer than this."
Published: April 16, 2000
Copyright 1999-2000, Santa Cruz County Sentinel Publishers Co.
Related Articles & Web Sites:
WAMM
www.wamm.org/
Medical Marijuana Crime in O.C. but not in Santa Cruz
www.cannabisnews.com/news...5392.shtml
Santa Cruz Pot Ordinance Allows Medical Marijuana
www.cannabisnews.com/news...5221.shtml
Santa Cruz Considers Medicinal Marijuana Ordinance
www.cannabisnews.com/news...5213.shtml
CannabisNews Medical Marijuana Articles and Archives:
www.cannabisnews.com/news...ical.shtml
google.com/search?lc=&num...isnews.com
Inside the Remote Farm That Supplies M. Marijuana
www.cannabisnews.com/news...5423.shtml
