BUSH'S REEFER MADNESS
by Louise Witt,
United States
The new front in the nation's drug war came into sharp focus at 7 a.m. on Sept. 5, when loud shouts and stomping woke Valerie Corral at her home north of Santa Cruz, Calif. Suspecting that the intruders weren't ordinary burglars, she snuck out a back entrance and walked around to her front door to tell them to leave. When she opened the door, stunned federal agents in flak jackets trained M-16s on the 50-year-old homeowner. When she asked to see a search warrant, the officers screamed at her to get down. They pushed her to her knees, then forced her to lie face down on the floor. With her hands handcuffed behind her back, an officer pressed his rifle muzzle to the back of her head.
Valerie Corral tried explaining to the agents ( there were about 30 ) that she and her husband, Michael, 53, ran Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, a legal cooperative in California that has grown the drug for 250 terminally ill and sick patients, many with cancer or AIDS, for almost nine years. Twenty-two of their clients have died in the past 12 months -- but to the officers from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, that didn't matter. The DEA took Valerie, still in green silk pajamas, and Michael to a federal detention center in San Jose. Under the Federal Controlled Substances Act, marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug -- dangerous and with no possible medicinal value -- right up there with heroin. Not only did they uproot and seize 167 marijuana plants, but they also confiscated the co-op's patient list.
"We do not target drug users," insists Will Glaspy, a DEA spokesman in Washington. "We target drug traffickers. There is no such term as 'medical marijuana,' except as created by the marijuana lobby."
In California and other states -- including three that will feature marijuana initiatives on Tuesday's ballots -- the marijuana lobby happens to be the voters. Valerie, who smokes pot to control grand mal epileptic seizures, worked to legalize medicinal marijuana in Santa Cruz county in 1992. Four years later, she helped draft California's Proposition 215, which lets patients who have a doctor's recommendation grow and use marijuana. So, on Sept. 17, in defiance of President Bush, DEA chief Asa Hutchinson and drug czar John Walters, the Corrals along with Santa Cruz Mayor Christopher Krohn, most of the city council members and a county supervisor handed out pot to patients on the steps of city hall. And under state and local law, it was perfectly legal to do so.
"When you look down the barrel of a gun, it's frightening," Valerie says. "But when you face illness or death, the inhumane actions of the government pale."
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