Talk:Valerie Corral

Article improvement

Just a note to say that I'm working on improving the coverage of this topic and to establish the notability of the subject and their work far beyond and outside of WAMM and to show how their medical necessity defense established their notability, not their creation of WAMM. Viriditas (talk) 21:47, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Note

Someone copied material directly from the sources without paraphrasing. I am working on cleaning this up. Viriditas (talk) 22:29, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

To do

• WAMM was an alternate, non-profit model for a free, no-cost dispensary instead of the current, dominant, for-profit model

Viriditas (talk) 02:11, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

I don't think it was a "free, no-cost dispensary". I think it was more like a pay-what-you-can program. The bills had to be paid somehow, and the members were the ones who paid them. Their website didn't encourage cash donations, and I can't find any evidence that they had any recognition as a 501(c)(3) (so donations wouldn't have been tax deductible – many corporations are non-profits, but only some of them are 501(c)(3)s). WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:10, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree there’s some confusion, but take a moment to look at my cited source if you have access. Corral and the author talk about how her free community model lost out to the modern, corporate-oriented dispensary model, and that’s a point I want to add to the article, however, I haven’t worked out all the details just yet, but if I’m reading this correctly, it turns out the laws were modified to promote a for profit model over time, and special legislation had to be passed to help small community models like hers survive. I believe that once the DEA and politicians got involved in the early 2000s, they did everything possible to privatize the model and destroy what Corral was doing and represents. This is an old story we see play out in every industry. Once the bean counters and money men come into the picture, the original models and values that laid the foundation for the original enterprise are forcibly dismantled. In the US, this has happened so many times that it’s almost expected. This is also what happened to the Internet. Outside of its original military context, the idea was to share information and knowledge, not to sell and commodity it. This is what happened to Corral’s idea. There’s an important aspect of the cannabis cultivation paradigm that feeds into this idea. Once growers actually setup and harvest the plants, the first thing they realize is that the plant is highly productive and results in far too much flower for any one person to use. This kind of surplus results in the concept of sharing and gifting. The Inuit people have the same idea, but not in relation to plants that they grow but to hunting. Once you remove the means of production from the community and industrialize it at a corporate scale, the fundamental values of sharing and gifting are lost. This is why the models are so different. Viriditas (talk) 04:40, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Update: "Members of our co-op receive medical marihuana free of charge or for a nominal donation...Our goal is to offer a community model that empowers patients and caregivers to provide for themselves and for one another." (Grinspoon 1997, p. 79) Viriditas (talk) 20:22, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Have you looked at a membership application? The 2014 version says "All WAMM members are required to remunerate cost of production for the health of our collective" (bold in the original) and asks whether the person can "make a minimum donation of $10 per gram", in addition to working "a few hours each week" (presumably done by proxy for people too disabled to work).

I assume they had some members who couldn't pay (or who could pay originally, but later couldn't). This news story (from two years later) suggests that the national market rate was two-thirds their suggested minimum donation. Assuming their expenses were typical, that would let two paying members cover the cost of one non-paying member. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:32, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

There’s a more recent article that explains what I was trying to describe here. Viriditas (talk) 01:35, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

Also Wendy Chapkis:

"I entered the conversation about marijuana legalization in the 1990s, writing an ethnography of one of the very earliest medical marijuana patient collectives in the US, the Wo/men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM) in Santa Cruz, California. For the members of WAMM, cannabis was a medicine, not a money tree. In fact, the co-founder of the organization, Valerie Leveroni Corral, was affectionately known to the membership as the “anti-profit.” Valerie, Michael Corral, and a group of seriously ill and terminally ill patients, collectively cultivated, harvested, and processed a small crop of cannabis and redistributed it without charge to the 200 or so patient members. This glorious, and fraught, experiment in the provision of medicine outside a cash economy survived for more than 25 years despite the challenges of relying largely on volunteer labor and in the face of the very significant threats from the federal government. In 2002, in an early morning raid by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the collective’s garden was destroyed, the co-founders were taken into custody by armed agents, and the seriously ill membership was traumatized. Valerie and Michael engaged in years of legal battles in the federal courts before winning important concessions. Early medical marijuana activists, then, were not only doing the work of patient care and cannabis provision but were also on the front lines doing battle against prohibition. Writing about WAMM made clear to me that, while their marijuana was free, it certainly was not without cost to the people who cultivated and distributed it. Now, in the early decades of cannabis legalization, the debt owed to those early activists is being repaid instead to venture capitalists who are cashing in on a safer investment climate. And, as prominent drug policy reform advocates observe, it is reshaping the movement. Just months before the 2016 election (in which medical marijuana would extend its reach by becoming legal in over half of all states in the US, and in which voters would legalize adult recreational use in four more states—California, Nevada, Massachusetts and Maine) the founder of the national Drug Policy Alliance, Ethan Nadelmann, warned that it might be the “last year in which drug policy reform organizations, driven primarily by concerns of civil liberties and civil rights and other good public policy motivations, will be able to significantly shape the legislation. [. . .] as the years progress, various industry forces will loom larger” (Lopez 2015). The same year, the national policy director for the Marijuana Policy Project Dan Riffle resigned because, he said, “the industry is taking over the legalization movement” (Warner 2015)." (Polson 2021)

In other words, same shit, different day. Viriditas (talk) 21:03, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

UCR Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research

Just a note to mention that UCR has archived all the back issues of the Santa Cruz Sentinel online, which means there is a lot of sources about Valerie Corral available. Viriditas (talk) 22:27, 18 April 2024 (UTC)