Valerie Corral

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Valerie Leveroni Corral (born 1953) is an American medical cannabis activist and writer.[1] As a young adult she experienced a traumatic head injury that left her with a seizure disorder that antiepileptic medication could not ameliorate. Her experimental use of cannabis to treat her seizures led her to grow it on her property in Santa Cruz, California. In 1992, she was arrested for cannabis cultivation, becoming the first person in that state to argue the medical necessity defense.[2] Following her success, she founded the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM) and was a coauthor of Proposition 215, the first medical cannabis state ballot initiative to pass in the United States.[3]

Early life

Valerie Leveroni was born in 1953. Her great-grandparents immigrated to America from Italy.[4] When she was 20, Valerie was involved in a traumatic car accident that would later indirectly lead to her career as a cannabis activist. On March 24, 1973, while she was a premed student at the University of Nevada, Valerie was a passenger in a Volkswagen Beetle being driven by her friend through Reno, Nevada, when a low-flying P-51 Mustang caused the vehicle to crash. Valerie and the driver were ejected from the vehicle and sustained massive injuries.[5]

Valerie was left with "uncontrollable grand mal seizures, triggering confusion, loss of muscle control, convulsions, and fainting."[6] She began taking a regimen of antiepilepsy and pain medicine that left her in a drug-induced stupor, but the spasms and seizures continued. For two years, Valerie was left in what she describes as a "pharmaceutical delirium".[7] Valerie met Michael Corral in June 1973. They became married in 1978 and Mike became her caregiver. He soon discovered an article in a medical journal highlighting the experimental use of cannabis to control seizures in rats.[7] Having tried everything else at that point, in 1986,[6] Valerie took the $40,000 from the insurance settlement and purchased property in the Santa Cruz mountains.[7] Here, the Corrals started a small cannabis garden to help treat Valerie's symptoms from her head trauma as well as provide cannabis for their sick friends.[1]

1992 raid

By 1992, Valerie and her husband Mike were growing their own food on their property in Santa Cruz as well as cultivating five cannabis plants to help control Valerie's seizures. Local law enforcement had questioned the Corrals about growing cannabis on their property, but had always accepted her reason for medical necessity. In August of that same year, helicopters working on behalf of the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP), a multi-agency law enforcement task force managed by the California Department of Justice, identified the Corrals plants during their surveying mission. Soon after, the Corrals were arrested the police.[8] The district attorney brought felony charges against them while asking for a prison sentence of three years.[1] Valerie mounted the first medical necessity defense in California leading to the dismissal of the case.[6]

Michael recalls that "before our arrest, we had never really thought about marijuana as being political. We were pretty much totally unaware that there was any kind of medical marijuana movement around at all. We lived back in the woods and just minded our own business, doing our own thing. The arrest changed all that; the people involved in the Measure A campaign found out about us and Valerie became the poster child for the initiative."[9] Measure A, the Santa Cruz medical cannabis ballot initiative, was approved by 77% of voters in November 1992.[10] Measure A was the second medical cannabis initiative in California following Proposition P in San Francisco, which passed in 1991.[11]

Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM)

In 1993, Valerie founded the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM), a cooperative organization that offers medical cannabis to qualifying patients for free. The group maintained and grew their own cannabis, which they closely monitored for quality, and provided educational resources to the community, including an early database informed by surveys and statistical analysis (run by a statistician) matching patient symptoms with different types of cannabis and their effectiveness. A three-year study of 77 patients was published in 2001.[12] Sociologist Wendy Chapkis places WAMM in the context of second wave feminist health care collectives.[13] The Corrals helped draft California Proposition 215, which passed on November 5, 1996. Just two days later, WAMM was incorporated as a non-profit.[14]

2002 raid

On September 5, 2002, the Corral's home, medical cannabis dispensary, and cannabis farm in Santa Cruz was raided by federal agents. Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) arrived early in the morning with guns drawn, placing the Corral family in handcuffs. They took chainsaws to more than 150 cannabis plants and destroyed them, an act that was recorded by Corral's security system and replayed later on KTVU-TV news. Agents transported the Corrals to a federal prison in San Jose where they were put into small holding cells. [15] A standoff ensued, with patients, many of whom were terminally ill and in wheelchairs, gathering to block the road to prevent the DEA from leaving. An agreement was reached to end the blockade in exchange for the release of the Corrals.[16]

More than a week after the raid, WAMM supporters held a rally at Santa Cruz City Hall. Arnold Leff, a physician who worked with WAMM patients and who was a former associate director of the White House Office of Drug Abuse Prevention under President Richard Nixon, attended the event, calling the raid "an outrageous example of a government without compassion".[16] Later, then state attorney general Bill Lockyer questioned why the raid had even been conducted in the first place. Asa Hutchinson, then acting DEA administrator, issued a response: "The DEA's responsibility is to enforce our controlled substances laws, and one of them is marijuana. Someone could stand up and say one of those marijuana plants is designed for someone who is sick, but under federal law, there’s no distinction."[16]

WAMM Phytotherapies

With the passage of Proposition 64 in 2016, recreational cannabis use was legalized in California. Dispensaries began opening in 2018 under the new law, forcing WAMM to shut its doors for legal reasons.[17] Under the new law, there was no legal way compassionate care services like WAMM could donate authorized products to patients. In response to this need, new legislation was written and passed in March 2020. SB-34, The Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary Act, allowed WAMM and other groups like it to reenter the new legal cannabis arena with legitimate licenses of exemption. In 2020, WAMM reorganized and opened its doors as "WAMM Phytotherapies" under the protection of the new law.[18]

Legacy

Valerie's Santa Cruz-based group was one small part of a larger coalition of cannabis activists in California, which was informally headquartered at the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club with Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary Rathbun. They were in turn joined by Dale Gieringer of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), and Jeff Jones from the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative. Together, they worked on drafts in 1995 for the Compassionate Use Act and later Proposition 215 on the 1996 ballot.[19] In 2003, the Los Angeles Times described Valerie as "the face of Santa Cruz's wildly successful medical marijuana initiative" in the wake of harassment from the federal government.[20] Writing for The New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan called Valerie "the Florence Nightingale and Johnny Appleseed of medical marijuana rolled into one".[21]

Selected publications

See also

Notes and references

Notes

References

  1. ^ a b c Nieves 2001.
  2. ^ Tiersky 1999.
  3. ^ Clark 2015.
  4. ^ Associated Press 2004.
  5. ^ Hecht 2014, pp. 2-3; Chapkis & Webb 2008, p. 39.
  6. ^ a b c Hecht 2014, pp. 2-3.
  7. ^ a b c Grinspoon 1997, pp. 76-79.
  8. ^ Chapkis & Webb 2008, p. 42.
  9. ^ Chapkis & Webb 2008, p. 43.
  10. ^ Chapkis & Webb 2008, p. 43; Heddleston 2012 p. 229.
  11. ^ Chapkis & Webb 2008, p. 221.
  12. ^ Corral 2001; Russo 2017.
  13. ^ Chapkis 2013, pp. 71-88.
  14. ^ Chapkis & Webb 2008, p. 44.
  15. ^ Chapkis & Webb 2008, pp. 176-177.
  16. ^ a b c Hecht 2014, pp. 8-11.
  17. ^ Ibarra 2018.
  18. ^ WAMM 2020.
  19. ^ Heddleston 2013, pp. 123-143.
  20. ^ Bailey 2003.
  21. ^ Pollan 1997, p. 23.

Bibliography

  • "Not Your Average Pot Proponent". Associated Press. May 24, 2004.
  • Bailey, Eric (August 11, 2003). "Santa Cruz Clinic Leads Medical Marijuana Charge". Los Angeles Times.
  • Chapkis, W., Webb, R. J. (2008). Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 0814790097. OCLC 779828407.
  • Chapkis, Wendy (2013). "The Trouble with Mary Jane's Gender". Humboldt Journal of Social Relations. 35.
  • Clark, Samantha (May 12, 2015). "Santa Cruz collective WAMM fundraising to buy cannabis garden site". Santa Cruz Sentinel. Retrieved April 18, 2024.
  • Corral, Valerie Leveroni (2001). "Differential effects of medical marijuana based on strain and route of administration: a three-year observational study". Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics. 1 (3-4): 43-59.
  • Grinspoon, Lester, and James B. Bakalar (1997)[1971] Marihuana, The Forbidden Medicine. Rev. and exp. ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300070853. OCLC 36178980.
  • Hecht, Peter (2014). Weed Land: Inside America's Marijuana Epicenter and How Pot went Legit. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520275446. OCLC 868277441.
  • Heddleston, Thomas R. (June 2012). "From the Frontlines to the Bottom Line: Medical Marijuana, the War on Drugs, and the Drug Policy Reform Movement" (PhD thesis). UC Santa Cruz.
  • Heddleston, Thomas (2013). "A Tale of Three Cities: Medical Marijuana, Activism, and Local Regulation in California". Humboldt Journal of Social Relations. 35.
  • Ibarra, Nicholas (July 24, 2018). "In Santa Cruz, nation's oldest cannabis co-op still searching for new home". Santa Cruz Sentinel. Retrieved April 18, 2024.
  • Nieves, Evelyn (January/February 2001). "Half an ounce of healing". Mother Jones. 26 (1): 48-53.
  • Pollan, Michael (July 20, 1997). "Living With Medical Marijuana". The New York Times Magazine.
  • Russo, Ethan B. (May 2017). "Cannabis and epilepsy: An ancient treatment returns to the fore". Epilepsy & Behavior. 70 (B): 292-297.
  • Tiersky, Marcia (Winter 1999). "Medical Marijuana: Putting the Power Where It Belongs". Northwestern University Law Review 93 (2): 547-595.
  • WAMM (February 27, 2020). "Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana will distribute 'compassionate cannabis' on March 1". Voices of Monterey Bay. Press release.

Further reading

  • Everett, Everett (2004). "Raich v. Ashcroft: Medical Marijuana and the Revival of Federalism". San Diego L. Rev. 1873.
  • Lussenhop, Jessica (November 12, 2008). "Paradise Lost". Metro Silicon Valley. Retrieved April 17, 2024.
  • O'Hanlon, Larry (May 26, 1998). "Final effort on medicinal pot". Santa Cruz Sentinel. pp. A1, A3.
  • Perez, Steve (January 15, 1993). "Medical marijuana plea rejected by judge". Santa Cruz Sentinel. 136 (13): A1, A14.
  • Perez, Steve (March 30, 1993). "Group vows to help ailing procure pot". Santa Cruz Sentinel. 136 (88): A2.
  • "Supervisors urged to take up issue". Santa Cruz Sentinel. August 7, 1996. 139 (218): A3.
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