In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

183 8 Lessons in Endurance and Impermanence A Sense of Violation and Fear On the morning of September 5, 2002, Gabriel Demaine, WAMM’s volunteer coordinator, wheeled her bike around the corner and into the WAMM parking lot. There she discovered three cars parked at hurried angles by the office door: Gabriel: I recognized the cars, but nothing about the way they were parked—or even the fact that they were there on a day when the office was closed—looked familiar. As I skidded to a stop and rushed through the open front door, I felt adrenaline shoot through me. I found a half dozen patients and caregivers systematically but frantically dismembering the office: unplugging computers, pulling files, and loading them into the cars out front. Every telephone was in use. There was an electrified atmosphere of Danger! Disaster! Emergency! Still I stupidly asked, “Hey, what’s going on?” The answer, of course, was, “The DEA raided the garden this morning. Ange is calling the lawyers, Hal is calling the emergency response phone tree, Paul and Kimo are getting the files and computers out of here. Suzanne is talking to the press. We don’t know how much time we’ve got.” I started working a phone line, fielding and directing calls from the media and from the membership, telling everyone how to get up to the land to join the folks who had barricaded the road and trapped the DEA. For WAMM members, the raid was a tremendous shock and yet not entirely unexpected. In the months preceding the raid, the organization had begun to actively prepare. One WAMM member, “Hal,” had become so alarmed by the increasing federal threats that he helped to develop the emergency response activated after the raid: “I was incredibly concerned 184 Lessons in Endurance and Impermanence about what the administration might do to us. I thought that if Val and Mike got arrested or if the office got busted or the garden got raided, we needed to have a phone tree. Someone would call me and then I would call the attorneys, the sheriff, the media, and fourteen other WAMM members. Those WAMM members would each in turn call twenty members . The idea was that, within two or three hours, everybody would know what was going on.” The plan was an effective one. As the news spread among the membership and then into the larger community, the response was immediate . County Supervisor Mardi Wormhoudt explained to the press that the Corrals operated in an “exemplary” fashion; she said that she was she “appalled” at the raid, which she called “an invasion.”1 It seemed almost inconceivable to many local residents that federal agents had entered the county and destroyed the work of terminally ill people growing their own medicine. That this occurred without the knowledge or consent of any public official or local law enforcement officer was widely reported in the media and further raised the hackles of the community.2 The prevailing belief was that California voters had certified the right of WAMM members to do what they were doing; the DEA had no business there. For WAMM members, the raid left in its wake a profound sense of violation and fear. As one member pointed out, “Now that the federal government has made clear that they don’t care what we said [about medical marijuana] in the state election, I wonder what’s the point of even voting then?” Disillusionment was coupled with tremendous anxiety; some patients suddenly found the price of membership in WAMM much too high. Others, like “Maria,” a fifty-two-year-old woman with advanced ovarian cancer, weighed the risks but decided to stay active in the organization: We lost a lot of people right after the raid. Some died; anxiety probably hurried their process of dying. But we also lost people from ill feelings. We were expecting people to do more and get less. We needed more help but, at the same time, people were getting less medicine. That didn’t go over well with some people. Some people decided to just go to the buyers ’ clubs instead. And we were all afraid to be in the meetings. We were afraid to work in the kitchens. I help make all the medicines and it makes me really nervous now. Are they going to come and take us away? Are they going to take my daughter away from me? I don’t want to be around...

Share