INSIDE A COMPASSIONATE POT PLANTATION

MSNBC visits what may be the nation’s only stateapproved marijuana farm

Valerie Corral Cultivates 32 Varieties Of Marijuana To Treat Different
Ailments.

By Charlene Laino MSNBC

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — On an expansive plot of land in the rolling hills
overlooking the Pacific, Valerie Corral grows marijuana for indigent
patients with ills ranging from AIDS to cancer. Not only do authorities
know — she has their stamp of approval.

“IT’S MUCH like stealing a boat to save a drowning man,” Valerie Corral
told me in her softspoken manner. “If you’ve committed a crime to prevent
a greater harm, then you’re protected under the necessity defense that
dates back to the Magna Carta.”

Corral was talking about how she started growing marijuana to control her
own epilepsy, and, put like that, it’s hard to see how anyone can argue
with her. If she hadn’t grown the pot, she would have continued having
lifethreatening grand mal seizures.

The potential harm mitigates the crime.

Even in 1992, more than five years before the passage of California’s
Proposition 215, legalizing marijuana for medical use, the public
apparently agreed. Corral was arrested for growing marijuana to control her
epilepsy, but the charges were dropped before ever coming to a trial.

“The District Attorney said he couldn’t find a jury that would convict me,”
Corral recalls.

But she lost her crop, a year of work. And the story didn’t end there.

“I thought [their dropping the charges] meant I could grow legally,” she
says. “I was wrong.” The sheriff waited several months — just enough time
for a new crop to grow — before again raiding her garden.

Again, the charges were dropped. But again too, she lost the crop.

The picture is very different now. Corral grows marijuana not just for
herself but for 125 seriously ill, indigent patients. And not only has the
new sheriff of Santa Cruz declined to prosecute her, the “plantation” has a
seal of approval from local government.

The mayor of Santa Cruz declared last November 15 National Medical
Marijuana Day and honored Corral in a city proclamation. And the Santa Cruz
County Women’s Commission named her a Woman of the Year.

Corral’s transformation from cannabis criminal to hemp heroine began after
the second arrest, when she formed the nonprofit Wo/Men’s Alliance for
Medical Marijuana (WAMM). With its stated purpose of providing pot to
indigent patients and educational research, the group was granted
nonprofit status by both state and local government.

32 VARIETIES OF MARIJUANA

As we walked around the acres surrounding her wooden frame house in the
hills, Corral explained that most of the plants — complex hybrids created
to treat different ailments — have already been harvested in advance of the
region’s first frost.

The leaves have been dried, weighed and stored. Each patient gets
oneeighth an ounce a week, and Corral has to ensure that there’s enough to
last 125 indigent people through the winter.

But in a greenhouse made from wires and white plastic sheets, two hearty
hybrids remain unharvested: a green strain that Corral says is best suited
for increasing AIDS patients’ appetites and a purplish strain for epilepsy.

Corral has collected four years of anecdotal information on which strains
work best for which ills, and uses this data to create new hybrids.

Now, she’s taking the research a step further, using a scale on which
patients rate, from one to five, how they feel after smoking each day. She
says she hopes to publish her findings in a medical journal.

But even without formal proof of its efficacy, marijuana is sensible
complementary medicine, Corral says. And it is compassionate medicine.

“Most of my patients have tried and discarded Marinol,” the FDAsanctioned
pills containing a synthetic version of marijuana’s active ingredient, she
says. She ticks off some of the reasons Marinol doesn’t work: “One, it’s a
pill, an absurd delivery system for patients with nausea and vomiting; two,
it comes on too strong.”

But the main reason, she says, is that the whole plant, with more than 400
active ingredients, is better medicine than a single, synthesized chemical.

“There’s reason to believe different components of the whole plant may be
useful for different conditions,” Corral says. Corral and other marijuana
advocates claim a wide range of conditions are relieved at least
momentarily by the drug: In addition to helping control epileptic seizures,
they say, it enhances AIDS patients’ appetites; relieves nausea and
vomiting in chemotherapy patients; alleviates chronic pain; reduces
spasticity in multiple sclerosis and asthma; and lowers the increased
intraocular pressure associated with glaucoma.

OUT FROM A PHARMACEUTICAL FOG

Yet another reason to embrace herbal medicine, Corral says, is that
patients can grow their own medication in their own backyards. Corral
offers seedlings to WAMM members so they can start their own pot gardens,
for free.

Corral herself turned to marijuana as medicine more than 20 years ago,
after a brain injury in a car accident brought on epilepsy. She suffered as
many as five seizures a day, and like 25 percent of all epileptics, didn’t
respond to any of the powerful drugs prescribed by her doctor.

“I lived a delirium of drugs, in a fog,” she recalls. “I felt as though as
I was underwater, under the full weight of pharmaceuticals, not to mention
side effects.”

Looking for alternatives, her husband read in a medical journal that
marijuana smoke controlled laboratoryinduced seizures in rats. “We
figured, why not give it a try?”

Marijuana worked where the prescription drugs had failed, eventually
controlling her seizures completely. As preventive care, she began smoking
some every day.

Today, when she senses the aura that can precede an attack, she takes a few
puffs — and the seizure is averted.

“Marijuana’s not a cure, but it mitigates the symptoms without severe side
effects,” she says. “Pot could replace or be an adjunct to 40 percent of
the pharmacopia.

“When you think about making a plant illegal, that’s insane.”