HALF AN OUNCE OF HEALING

The desperately ill members of a Santa Cruz marijuana club aren't growing
pot to get high or make money. They just want to find some relief.

Dorothy Gibbs is lying in bed in her trailer, barely able to move. It is a
gorgeous Saturday afternoon in Santa Cruz, the October sun as full as
July's. The curtains in Gibbs' room are half open; she is squinting as
though the light stings her eyes. But her 90-year-old face, framed by a
snowy froth of hair, looks cheerful, almost youthful. "I woke up in pain
this morning," she says, "but then I took the marijuana and it made things
better."

She reaches for an eight-ounce bottle of brown liquid on a bedside tray and
takes a swig. The tonic, a concoction of soy milk and marijuana known as
Mother's Milk, looks like the muddy sand in a child's pail. "It doesn't
taste like much of anything," she says with a shrug. "It just makes me feel
better."

Ten years ago, Gibbs, who had developed polio as an infant, was stricken by
postpolio syndrome, leaving her arms nearly useless and her nerves on fire.
Two years ago, at the suggestion of her full-time visiting nurse, she tried
pot for the pain. ("I tried smoking it first," she says, "but it hurt my
throat.") Now she is one of about 200 members of the Wo/Men's Alliance for
Medical Marijuana, or WAMM, a Santa Cruz, California, cannabis collective
run by and for people who are very ill.

If WAMM, the first medical marijuana club in the country to be granted
nonprofit status, will not convince skeptics that cannabis may have a
healthy purpose, nothing will. The collective, which grows its own
marijuana and distributes it free to its members each week, is no pot
party. About 85 percent of its members are terminally ill. Many of those
who line up at the club's small, borrowed storefront every Tuesday evening
had not used the drug before they developed life-threatening illnesses like
cancer and AIDS. Others hadn't tried it before exhausting a medicine
chest's worth of pharmaceuticals for chronic, debilitating ailments like
postpolio syndrome or epilepsy. Relatively few have used marijuana the way
Bill Clinton did in college, for fun.

The Tuesday night WAMM line is a gallery of illness. People come in
wheelchairs, using walkers, clutching canes, bald from chemotherapy, gaunt,
hollow-eyed, nearly wasted. The healthiest looking are the caregivers who
come to pick up pot for members who are too ill to come themselves.

But it is not a grim group. After sitting in on five WAMM meetings, led by
its firebrand director, Valerie Leveroni Corral, I was most struck by how
spirited, even happy, members sounded. People announced picnic lunches,
organized a weekend in Reno, offered rides, memorialized the latest member
to die with fond remembrances and spirited anecdotes. They also complained,
like a family around the dinner table. In one meeting, a member with AIDS
griped about having to wait around for an hour listening to everyone's
"issues" before the marijuana is doled out: "I'm in a room full of sick
people," he said. "I don't exactly feel great about that when my T-cell
count is down." That led to an hour of collective soul-searching on just
what WAMM is supposed to be -- a community or a marijuana dispensary.

With laws legalizing medical marijuana already in effect in California,
Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Maine, and Hawaii (and with initiatives
recently approved in Colorado and Nevada), medical marijuana groups around
the country have been calling on WAMM to see how patient-run collectives
ought to operate. It is not easy. Federal law supersedes state law, and the
government refuses to budge in classifying marijuana as a dangerous,
illegal narcotic -- and a gateway to harder drugs -- with no medical value.
This means that in states where medical marijuana is legal, local and state
law enforcement may leave the collectives alone but the Department of
Justice could still step in, shut down the clubs, and prosecute patients
and their caregivers. In 1999, an Institute of Medicine report commissioned
by President Clinton's then drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey, concluded
that patients suffering from severe pain, nausea, and appetite loss might
find "broad spectrum relief not found in any other single medication" by
using marijuana. But that failed to alter the federal government's position
that possessing marijuana for any reason should be a crime.

There is an encouraging development in the battle for legitimacy: In
September, ruling on a class-action suit filed against the government by
medical marijuana advocates, including WAMM, federal Judge William Alsup of
the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco ruled that the government could
not punish doctors who recommend the benefits of marijuana to their
patients. And while the federal government has threatened to prosecute
medical marijuana patients, that seems increasingly unlikely given the
public's growing acceptance of the drug as medicinal.

Medical marijuana clubs began quietly operating in the early 1990s in
response to the AIDS crisis, and in 1996 California passed a groundbreaking
voter initiative, Proposition 215, that legalized possession of marijuana
for patients with a doctor's recommendation who are suffering from AIDS,
cancer, glaucoma, and other illnesses. But the fight for the right to exist
is far from over. Especially since the passage of Prop. 215, the federal
government (or state and local police, invoking federal law) has continued
to shut down marijuana clubs in California and has repeatedly confiscated
plants.

WAMM was started in 1993, lucky to be born in Santa Cruz. The coastal city
about 75 miles south of San Francisco is one of the most tolerant in the
country. Here's a place where old and young hippies sit cross-legged on the
sidewalk, strumming guitars all day, where the City Council proposed
"sleeping zones" for the homeless (until the town was inundated by urban
campers from all over the West), and where the nation's first bed and
breakfast for medical marijuana users opened last year with great fanfare.
True to form, Santa Cruz has honored WAMM with official proclamations and
vowed to defend the collective's right to exist. The city's position,
endorsed by the mayor, district attorney, and chief of police, is that
Santa Cruz will abide by California's medical marijuana law, and never mind
the feds.

In fact, WAMM runs a tight ship. It is strict about membership, admitting
only the very sick, and only those with a written recommendation from a
doctor who agrees to monitor the use of marijuana in the patient's
treatment. The club also preaches respect for the law. Except for the
location of its marijuana garden, deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, it is
not secretive about how it operates. 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-year-old and mother of three teenage sons,
who had been disabled by a severe case of postpolio 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."