Valerie Corral

Valerie Leveroni Corral (born 1953) is an American medical cannabis activist and writer. 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. 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.

Early life Valerie Leveroni was born in 1953. Her great-grandparents immigrated to America from Italy. 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.

Valerie was left with "uncontrollable grand mal seizures, triggering confusion, loss of muscle control, convulsions, and fainting." 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", where she developed an addiction to phenobarbital and diazepam which she was prescribed to mitigate her seizures.

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.

Soon after, the Corrals were arrested by the police. 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." Measure A, the Santa Cruz medical cannabis ballot initiative, was a "nonbinding referendum recommending that police and prosecutors use discretion in cases where seriously ill patients were using marijuana for medical reasons". Measure A was the second medical cannabis initiative in California following Proposition P in San Francisco, which passed in 1991.

The district attorney brought felony charges against the Corrals while asking for a prison sentence of three years.

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. Sociologist Wendy Chapkis places WAMM in the context of second wave feminist health care collectives. The Corrals helped draft California Proposition 215, which passed on November 5, 1996. Just two days later, WAMM was incorporated as a non-profit.

2002 raid On September 5, 2002, the Corral's home, dispensary, and cannabis farm in Santa Cruz was raided by 30 agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) dressed in combat uniforms and equipped with automatic firearms. Neither the Santa Cruz County sheriff's office, police chief, or local officials were notified of the raid by the DEA. Agents 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. 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.

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". 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." These raids are extensively documented in various legal filings. including raids on cannabis buyer clubs in "West Hollywood, San Francisco, Oakland and Sebastapol".

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. Under the new law, there was no legal way compassionate care services like WAMM could donate authorized products to patients.efn-lg|name=sb|group=note|"Under state regulations that went into effect...compassionate care programs must collect taxes on the market value of cannabis that they give to patients. Many of these programs say they cannot afford the taxes nor the cost of state and local permits required to obtain cannabis from legal growers." "After the passage of Proposition 64...California began requiring collectives to get licensed like a commercial dispensary. Unable to complete the expensive and complex process, many shut down..."Overnight, our whole system fell apart," said Valerie Corral..."They were so busy counting tax dollars that they put us all out of business." "Frustration runs deep among medical cannabis patients and advocates who — by persuading voters to pass Proposition 215 in 1996 — paved the way for legal weed in California, but now feel left behind in a post-Proposition 64 era. In a profit-centered system focused on recreational sales, they argue there is little consideration for patients and their unique needs. Collectives that once provided cannabis and community largely dissolved nearly five years ago, as California transitioned to a new regulatory framework based around licensed growers and retailers. Dispensaries, which are still prohibited in many parts of the state by local rules, have not widely embraced a replacement program that allows them to donate medical marijuana to patients who cannot afford to buy it. Medical identification cards, which can cost several hundred dollars to renew annually, confer few tangible benefits."

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. 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. Writing for The New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan called Valerie "the Florence Nightingale and Johnny Appleseed of medical marijuana rolled into one".

Selected publications Corral, Valerie Leveroni (2001). "Differential Effects of Medical Marijuana Based on Strain and Route of Administration". Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics. 1 (3–4): 43–59.

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