Medical Marijuana Madness

Just before 7 a.m. on Sept. 5, before the sun could rise over the slope above his house, Mike Corral awakened to the sound of vehicles driving over the narrow gravel road leading to his property. He peeked outside the second-story window and saw five U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents, dressed in black combat gear and wielding automatic weapons, marching towards his door. Like an episode out of Cops, the agents busted in the unlocked house and screamed at Corral to hit the floor. "Stay calm, I’m not going to resist, you don’t have to do this," he recalls saying before the agents pushed him to the ground, frisked and handcuffed him.

Mike’s wife, Valerie, and two friends slept in an adjacent house on the couple’s 106-acre property -- a quarter of which they own -- nestled in the hills of northern, coastal Santa Cruz County, when Valerie heard heavy boot steps in her home. One of her friends, Suzanne Pfeil, a paraplegic who requires a respirator to breath, was being ordered out of bed. Because she couldn’t stand without the aid of crutches, agents handcuffed her to her bed. Meanwhile, Valerie, wearing the green silk pajamas that her mother had given her for her 50th birthday, walked through the door of the room and demanded, "What are you doing in my house? Get out." The officers told her several times to hit the ground, while Valerie asked to see a search warrant and their badges.

Instead, the DEA shoved her to the ground and cuffed her. The bantam, five-foot-tall Valerie was no match physically for the heavily armed agents, but she stood her ground, telling them that what they were doing was wrong. "The only way your going to shut me up is with Duct tape," Valerie told the agents gathered in the house. "You're causing harm, you're causing suffering and you need to know it." For the past decade, the Corrals have run the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM), a cooperative that grows marijuana and shares the harvested crop among its membership of medical marijuana patients, who swear by the reefer’s relief. WAMM patients suffer from cancer, AIDS, glaucoma, polio, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy (Valerie Corral suffers from seizures herself) and a host of other afflictions. And conventional pharmaceuticals, they say, just don’t do the trick. But that’s none of the DEA’s concern. The Corrals were taken, handcuffed, to the federal courthouse in San Jose, where they spent the next eight hours in a holding cell. Meanwhile, agents took a chainsaw to 167 marijuana plants growing on the Corrals’ farm.

As shocking as the morning proved to be, the Corrals feared a bust might be imminent. The WAMM bust is just one in a recent rash of raids on mom-and-pop medical marijuana cooperatives across the state. In the past year, the agency has raided gardens producing as few as six plants -- chump change in terms of the feds’ goal of eradicating illicit drugs. And the DEA promises more raids are on the way.

Slash and Burn

Nestled on a hill at the end of a long, bone-jolting road, sits the Corrals’ home, where the couple has lived for 16 years. The uprooted WAMM garden is discreetly set 20 or so yards from the side of the ranch-style house, behind an old wooden gate. Aside from a small crop of corn, squash and few heavily laden tomato plants, the wheelchair-accessible garden is stripped bare, weed-less and dusty. Every 10 feet there are craters where the marijuana’s roots once grew, the only hint of what was.

Up until Sept. 5, the Corral’s regularly doled out pot to 238 card-carrying medical marijuana patients, 85 percent suffering from terminal illnesses. WAMM is touted as a model medical-marijuana cooperative. Patients and caregivers help grow the weed, which is given away, not sold. And the organization is picky about who gets it. It’s an unusual co-op -- more hospice than pot club -- and it’s a place where patients not only get pot to relieve suffering but find emotional support. WAMM enjoys the support of the Santa Cruz City Council, the county Board of Supervisors and the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department.