SANTA CRUZ MEDICAL MARIJUANA COLLECTIVE STAYS TRUE TO ITS ROOTS

By his count, Don Ivey, 56, should have been dead six times by now.

The artisan and former competitive in-line skater survived both a
stabbing and a scuba diving accident as a young man. Fifteen years
ago, he was diagnosed with AIDS and hepatitis C. Five years ago, he
crashed a motorcycle, landing facedown, partially paralyzed, in an ocean bay.

Recently, just 30 days removed from his second emergency room visit
for internal bleeding and vomiting blood, Ivey walked up a terraced
marijuana garden that is a medicinal and spiritual refuge for the
sick, injured and dying.

Rising above rows of English lavender and shielded by a
crescent-shaped ridge in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the pot garden for
the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana is an icon in the history
of the California marijuana movement.

The garden survives despite a 2002 raid and seizure of the crop by
heavily armed federal agents. It thrives amid an aura of death, as
members reap the harvest while grieving for those who succumb to
terminal illnesses.

"Love grows here," Ivey said, plucking unwanted yellowish leaves from
the pot plants and stuffing them into his paralyzed hand, permanently
balled into a fist. "This is not a pot club. This is a group of
people who are doing it for each other, for real compassion."

Organized as a cannabis-growing commune, WAMM planted its garden
three years before California voters approved Proposition 215, the
1996 law that legalized marijuana for medical use. Its members,
including cancer, AIDS and other seriously ill patients, sow, harvest
and share the crop.

Founders Mike Corral, 60, and his wife, Valerie, 58, started growing
marijuana to relieve seizures Valerie began to suffer after a car
accident. They thought their simple garden and its authentic
marijuana-growing collective would become the model for medical
cultivation and distribution.

Instead, medical marijuana in California has boomed with
pseudo-retail "collectives" peddling designer cannabis strains and
handling millions of dollars in transactions. A $1 billion dispensary
trade serves a vast range of marijuana users and ailments generally
far less serious than the life-altering challenges at WAMM.

"I think we were naive to think that this wouldn't happen. This is
America. Capitalism reigns supreme," Mike Corral said. "We're a
socialist organization trying to exist in a capitalist world."

Death a constant presence

California voters are poised to vote on a November initiative to
legalize marijuana for recreational use. But WAMM members say they
will continue to operate as always, no matter the outcome.

The group's 225 members hold meetings to distribute their marijuana
based on medical need and ability to pay. In a "design for dying"
program, they organize bedside vigils and assistance for those in
their final days of life.

Since its inception, 223 members have died from illnesses or medical
conditions whose symptoms they had alleviated with marijuana.

High above the garden, a surfboard, urns, quartz rocks and Buddhist
figures mark buried ashes of 17 members. Others are commemorated on
painted rocks nearby or in hundreds of photographs that fill walls
of the collective's offices in downtown Santa Cruz.

"Death is a daily part of life in WAMM," said Sheri Paris, a former
UC Santa Cruz creative writing professor and WAMM member now disabled
with a brain condition.

"People who talk about this as a pretext to get high should look at
the pictures on the wall," she said, puffing on a marijuana cigarette
in the WAMM office, a regimen she says quells her seizures. "The
government would have you think that people are coming here for
hangnails. If they're faking it, they're faking it to the point of dying."

WAMM's medical adviser, Santa Cruz physician Dr. Arnold Leff, is a
former deputy director of the White House office of drug abuse under
President Richard Nixon. He began treating HIV and AIDS patients in
1985, and soon recommended marijuana to ease their anxiety, nausea
and pain from nerve damage.

He says marijuana isn't an appropriate remedy for everyone. But he
said: "You take terminally ill people and you put them in this
environment and the bottom line is they feel better and live longer."

Up in the garden, Don Ivey penned his name on a nursery tag for a
flowering marijuana plant he put in the ground months ago with a
shovel he can cradle with but one arm.

"It has given my life purpose," he said. "If you don't have purpose,
you start listening to that communication between your ears that it
is all gloom and doom and you're going to die. Now I look forward to
every day I'm alive. And I've always wanted to be a pot grower."

DEA raid leads to standoff

Law enforcement authorities weren't eager to accept WAMM's marijuana garden.

Shortly before the Corrals established the collective, Santa Cruz
County deputies arrested the couple for illegal cultivation over five
plants they were growing for Valerie's seizures. She filed
California's first known "medical necessity" defense for marijuana.
The district attorney ultimately refused to prosecute.

But on Sept. 5, 2002, a decade after 77 percent of voters in liberal
Santa Cruz County approved a local medical marijuana initiative and
nearly six years after Californians approved Proposition 215, dozens
of DEA agents swooped in on the WAMM site.

In the widely publicized incident, agents rousted sleeping medical
marijuana patients from houses and detained and handcuffed Mike and
Valerie Corral at gunpoint. With chain saws, they cut down 167
harvest-ready plants and packed up the crop.

Korean War veteran and former Santa Cruz clothing manufacturer Harold
"Hal" Margolin, then 70, went to the scene. The heart patient, who
used the marijuana for pain after back surgery left him nearly
crippled, remembers weeping.

"They had come with a heavy hand to show us that we were not going to
be able to do this. And they were teaching us a lesson," he said.

DEA agents, enforcing federal laws against marijuana cultivation,
ordered Margolin and other WAMM members to retreat. They did but
then chained and padlocked a gate at the entrance to the property,
trapping the authorities inside.

A tense standoff played out before a swarm of media. WAMM followers
refused to allow the government convoy and U-Hauls of seized pot to
leave until receiving word on the fate of Mike and Valerie Corral.
From a San Jose federal detention facility, Valerie Corral told the
WAMM members to let the agents leave.

Federal prosecutors filed no charges. But the raid stirred a
political fury and newfound sympathy for the medical marijuana movement.

"I thought the DEA was out of its mind," said former state
Assemblyman John Vasconcellos, who a year later authored state
legislation implementing guidelines to allow marijuana cultivation
and distribution under Proposition 215. "We had wars going on and
violent crime. And they were raiding people in pain."

The city and county of Santa Cruz joined a WAMM lawsuit to protect
its right to cultivate marijuana. In 2004, U.S. District Judge Jeremy
Fogel issued an injunction barring federal incursions on the WAMM site.

Late last year, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the U.S.
Justice Department would no longer target legal medical marijuana
operations in states permitting medicinal use. This January, WAMM
settled its lawsuit against the government with an agreement to
refile the case if it is targeted again.

Diverse range of patients

In the eight years since the raid, Margolin, now 78, had a heart
attack his second and was diagnosed with leukemia. His injured back
gradually moved him from "a cane to a walker to a wheelchair."

He took frequent, daily puffs of marijuana, calculating just enough,
he said, to reduce his pain without feeling overly impaired. As his
health deteriorated, he began cultivating pot at home to supply other
collective members.

"The first year, they said, 'Don't bother.' It wasn't any good," he
said. "The second year, the pot was pretty damn good. I learned how
to do it. I talked to the plants every day."

At one recent WAMM members meeting, patients including a blind woman
with a guide dog and several people in wheelchairs showed up to get
their medicine dried marijuana packed in plastic bags and placed in
manila envelopes.

Seth Prettol, 30, a Modesto resident and San Jose State University
engineering student paralyzed in a fall from a rope swing near
Yosemite, made it to the meeting after a long absence. He used to
work in the garden, grinding marijuana leaves in his wheelchair for
use in skin creams said to have anti-inflammatory properties and
liquid elixirs touted as an alternative to smoking.

He was cheered as he rolled into the room. But he was tense with
muscle spasms. Danny Rodriques, 61, an AIDS patient and former San
Francisco barkeep, massaged Prettol's shoulders.

The members discussed a "WAMMfest" community festival to raise money
for the group, which operates on an annual budget of $165,000.

Mike Corral gave the weekly garden report. "The garden is beautiful," he said.

WAMM now 'my family'

The next Thursday morning, former auto detailer Jose Valencia, 46, a
lymphoma patient, and ex-Amador County paramedic Pete Herzog, 50, who
has Lyme disease, rose early to cut weeds and brush from the mountain
grave sites of WAMM members.

Below, amid wafting marijuana smoke, others readied for shifts in the
garden in a work room brimming with freshly painted memorial stones.

One rock was for Maria Lucinda "Lucy" Garcia, a former Santa Cruz
hairdresser and make-up artist who came to WAMM dying from ovarian
cancer. She became a fixture in the garden but was uncomfortable
about the pot she smoked to alleviate her nausea.

"She never smoked in front of her daughter," Valerie Corral said.
"She was very clear in delineating the lines."

When Garcia died, WAMM members dressed her in a long red gown.
Valerie Corral did her hair and nails. At Garcia's request, Corral
adopted her daughter, Shana Conti, now 19.

Now, Hal Margolin says his moment is near. His leukemia has advanced
to a terminal stage.

He is in an acute care unit at Santa Cruz's Dominican Hospital for a
broken hip. He's being visited by his wife and children and deluged
with cards from WAMM members preparing to help him upon his release
from the hospital.

"My family is called WAMM," Margolin said. "I don't know if it will
go down in history or not. But if it does, the story will be that we
did it the right way."