WAMM, the Santa Cruz patients' collective

The Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana, known as WAMM, was a patients’ cooperative in the hills near Santa Cruz, California. Its members, most of them seriously or terminally ill, tended a shared garden and received cannabis without paying for it. It was the opposite of a shop: no sales, no profit, and the growing done by and for the people who used it.^[1][2]

It became a test of how far a state’s medical law could protect patients in the United States. In 2002 federal agents raided it. The city and county of Santa Cruz did not side with the agents. They sued the federal government alongside the collective.^[2]

A garden instead of a dispensary

Valerie Corral founded WAMM in 1993, three years before California’s voters passed Proposition 215; her husband Mike was her caregiver. Members grew the cannabis themselves and watched its quality closely. The collective kept a database built from members’ surveys to match symptoms with types of cannabis, and published a three-year study of 77 patients in 2001.^[1]

By 2003 it served about 250 patients, 85 per cent of them terminally ill, and gave them cannabis and other care free of charge.^[2] Proposition 215 protected patients and their “primary caregivers” who grew cannabis for a doctor-recommended medical use; it said nothing about selling it.^[3] A cooperative garden fitted that law more closely than any shop.

The raid

In September 2002, about thirty agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration raided the Corrals’ home and the collective’s garden. They destroyed some 167 plants, handcuffed the Corrals and took them to San Jose; a blockade by patients ended with their release.^[1][2]

The reaction in Santa Cruz was unusual. Supporters rallied at City Hall, and the mayor, Christopher Krohn, called the raid “unannounced and against the will of the people”. In December 2002 the city council deputised Valerie and Mike Corral as medical-cannabis providers.^[1]

Santa Cruz v. Washington

In April 2003 WAMM, seven of its patients and the city and county of Santa Cruz sued the attorney general, John Ashcroft, the acting head of the DEA and the White House drug czar. They argued that federal agents had exceeded the commerce power and violated the Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments, and asked the court to stop raids on state-sanctioned medical cannabis providers.^[2]

	What happened
September 2002	DEA raid; 167 plants destroyed
April 2003	Collective, patients, city and county sue in San Jose
April 2004	Judge Jeremy Fogel bars federal interference while the case goes on; WAMM grows again
2005	The Supreme Court’s Gonzales v. Raich upholds federal power over home-grown medical cannabis
August 2008	Fogel rules Washington may not deliberately subvert California’s law

In April 2004 Judge Jeremy Fogel, relying on the appeals court’s decision in Raich v. Ashcroft, barred the Justice Department from interfering with the collective while the case was pending. NORML reported that more than 25 of WAMM’s patients had died since the raid.^[4] The Supreme Court then reversed Raich, holding that Congress could reach cannabis grown and used at home.

The case went on. On 20 August 2008, in County of Santa Cruz v. Mukasey, Fogel refused to dismiss it, holding that the Constitution bars the federal government from deliberately subverting a state’s medical cannabis laws. He drew on the reasoning of Conant v. Walters, the case that protected doctors who recommend cannabis.^[5]

Closing and reopening

The collective outlived the federal case but not the market. After California legalised adult use and licensed shops opened in 2018, WAMM had no legal way to give cannabis away and closed. A 2020 state law named after Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary allowed compassionate programmes to donate again, and it reopened that year as WAMM Phytotherapies.^[1]