Valerie Leveroni-Corral: Advocate for End-of-live Care
Written by Jessica Peralta
Valerie Leveroni Corral’s journey with cannabis began with a car accident.
“A plane buzzed our car. My friend was driving my Volkswagen bug and the car flipped and rolled and that left me with a TBI, a traumatic brain injury,”said Leveroni Corral, executive director of WAMM Phytotherapies in Santa Cruz, Calif.
Leveroni Corral’s life was forever changed that day in 1973. At 20 years old, she was left with epilepsy and debilitating migraines.
She was prescribed Percodan, Valium, Mysoline, Dilantin and phenobarbital, but they didn’t stop the convulsions and grand mal seizures. She could have as many as five seizures a day and often had to be hospitalized. Plus, side effects of the drugs left her lethargic and unable to function.
“Those pharmaceuticals have devastating side effects,” she said.
While Leveroni Corral’s personal discovery of cannabis as medicine began her journey, WAMM — the Wo/men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana — began in 1993 following an arrest.
How a Santa Cruz woman’s life-changing accident led to her becoming a key figure in medical cannabis access for those who need it most.
Valerie Leveroni Corral
How WAMM Started
By the ’90s … we knew quite well the applications
“So WAMM was really born out of an arrest — which is the way a lot of activists become public, because until then, if you’re doing something illegal, being underground is safer.
And at least that was the experience for me,” she said.
With her seizures under control with the help of cannabis and plenty of plant available to her because it grew easily where she lived in Santa Cruz, things moved along smoothly. Until the early ‘90s.
“In 1992, everything changed — cops swung in, took our plants, arrested me and Mike,” she said. “And I was encouraged to challenge the law on medical necessity — which was much like stealing a boat to save a drowning person. Yes you committed a felony, but you did so to prevent a greater harm. … Ultimately the district attorney felt that he couldn’t find a jury to convict me but that didn’t stop the sheriff.”
The local sheriff arrested Leveroni Corral and her husband again the next year, but with the same end result.
“Following the second dismissal of our case, people started contacting me and asking, ‘Can you help us?’” she said.
Seriously ill people were looking for a safe, reliable and affordable medical cannabis source. Leveroni Corral and her husband discreetly supplied as many patients as possible, long before there were any laws in place protecting them.
“By the ‘90s, by the time we got arrested, we knew quite well the applications,” she said.
“We also had been working with other friends and family members with HIV, AIDS and cancers and we were providing it to them,” she said. “So our community was rather close-knit. But once we got arrested … many people sought us out and I just started putting pot in the back of my car in a basket and doing the kind of Red Riding Hood thing with, you know, delivering pot to people and working with them, collecting data.”
Data collection involved talking with the people she delivered to.
“Mostly I’d sit with them and we’d smoke pot and I’d ask questions and they’d answer,” she said. “So it was a really intimate and wonderful way to be present with someone … most people at the time were facing rigorous treatment and both with HIV and with cancer chemotherapies.”
She said with these people facing so much from their illness — including the real possibility of death — it was a chance to really connect with them.
“So it was a really profound opportunity to be with people at the most important time in their lives,” she said. “From that was [how] our community was built. And it’s not you know, it was never really one person or two people doing it. It was always a group of us and by that time, by the ‘90s, early ‘90s, cannabis had been really well-defined as a medical aid for relieving side effects.”
She said they didn’t know then that cannabis was actually also a profoundly effective medicine for treatment.
“We had an idea, but there was no science to substantiate that,” she said. “And, you know, there still could be a whole lot more science that there will be.”
By the mid-‘90s, they began working on the first statewide initiative to legalize medical cannabis. Leveroni Corral co-authored Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996.
Valerie Leveroni Corral speaks with members of WAMM during their first post-Covid meeting at Treehouse Dispensary in Santa Cruz, Calif.
How WAMM Grew
The steps of city hall were filled with our courageous membership
“We used the collective model to demonstrate the success of serving people whether they had money or not. Everyone was treated equally.
Our garden along with our weekly meetings was the place where people came together. And as knowledge of our organization grew, more people, people who were marginalized, sick people, people who live in poverty were able to come, grow their own medicine and find a place they could call home.”
In 2000, the city of Santa Cruz even deputized the couple, designating them as official medical cannabis suppliers to help give the collective some additional legal protection.
But on Sept. 5, 2002, armed Drug Enforcement Administration agents arrived at WAMM’s garden and held Leveroni Corral, her husband and two others at gunpoint before arresting the couple and taking them into custody, according to the WAMM Phytotherapies website.
“They raid our garden, cut our nearly 200 plants down with chainsaws and hold Mike and myself and our two friends at gunpoint,” she said. “I got pushed to my knees and then to my face, with a gun to the back of my head and a boot I presume in my back. It is a terrifying experience.”
Alerted by an emergency phone tree, WAMM members gathered outside the garden’s security gate, using their wheelchairs, canes and walkers to barricade the DEA inside, according to the website.
“Our brave members held these armed DEA agents at bay. The media was there and there are people in wheelchairs, people with walkers,” said Leveroni Corral. “People saying, ‘That’s our pot, that’s our medicine, that belongs to all of us.’ Following the raid, a week passes, we’re free from custody but face a mandatory minimum of 10 years in jail.”
They decided to replicate one of their weekly meetings on the steps of city hall and selected a handful of patients to pick up their medicine there.
That brought out thousands of people.
“The steps of city hall were filled with our courageous membership, the mayor, city council, supervisors, doctors, our attorneys and with the DEA helicopter overhead … spinning,” she said. “We continued for an hour to give away cannabis to talk back to the government to wake them up. And it had a significant impact. So like a lot of bullies, when challenged on that particular day, the DEA backed down.”
This led them to sue the federal government, the DEA and the U.S. Department of Justice, in federal court.
“Where the ruling was that we were allowed to continue to grow cannabis and allowed to continue to do our work,” she said. “And were they ever to come back onto our property, that we could pick up the lawsuit where it left off. That finding was significant, not only for us, but for the entire nation. Winning that injunction against the federal government was miraculous, just like being freed from seizure disorder.”
And up until the 2016 California Proposition 64 passed, which legalized recreational use, the collective enjoyed freedom to invite people in and to have a relationship with the plant. But Prop. 64 put an end to that.
WAMM continued to operate until Jan. 1, 2018 when new cannabis regulations prevented them from continuing as a collective and didn’t include any provisions for compassionate giving.
But on March 1, 2020, the Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary Act took effect in the state, restoring the ability of legal cannabis suppliers to give free cannabis to those in need.
Leveroni Corral officially launched WAMM Phytotherapies as a new, licensed cannabis company focused on making therapeutic quality, regeneratively grown cannabis products accessible and affordable to everyone while offering compassionate access to those in the most need.
“WAMM Phytotherapies emerges with the greatest parts of WAMM, service to our members, service to the plant, service to the planet and service to our community,” she said.