A smiling bouncer in a black skull and crossbones sweatshirt stood guard Sunday outside the door to a rented room where marijuana wafted through the air and reggae music pulsated.
But only those with medical marijuana authorization forms gained entrance to an event billed as the state’s first cannabis farmers market.
“These are farmers growing agricultural medicine, so it seemed like a no-brainer,” said Jeremy Miller, organizer and owner of Sacred Plant Medicine. “It’s a place where people can network with other patients in similar situations.”
Miller brought in just six vendors for the “dry run,” unsure of how many people would attend the event on South Tacoma Way. Its success means he may be able to make it a monthly affair from here on out.
It was held at the Conquering Lion, a gathering place and music venue expected to open soon.
The walls and floor were painted black. Two banners for Sacred Heart Medicine were draped on the wall. A table with brochures and stacks of the magazine “West Coast Cannabis” welcomed visitors.
Vendors preferred different terms – farmers, caregivers, providers. Half declined to give their names, but were happy to explain their products and how they could help people with various aches and pains.
A steady stream of patients filtered in and out, spending time at each booth before deciding which marijuana products appealed most. Some stayed for hours, socializing with friends or sharing a joint.
“Something like this lets people come get what they need in a safe environment,” said Justin Kravis, whose Kravi Crops booth attracted many.
His offerings were plentiful. He had about 6 ounces of different marijuana strains marked in clear jars. There was White Widow and Pandora’s Box and Moonwreck.
Next to a scale and plastic baggies were brownies, Rice Krispies treats and chocolate chip cookies. Two hours after the market opened, he had only two $20 clone plants left. (A clone plant is a way to reproduce the same strain of marijuana.)
It is illegal to sell marijuana, and state-authorized providers are allowed to grow cannabis for only one patient at a time. That’s why the farmers donated their products to the patients and patients in turn donated money to the farmers.
“For those few minutes, (the farmer is) that one person’s caregiver,” explained one man who declined to give his name.
On the opposite side of the room, Kathy Parkins had set up her “Cannaceuticals” booth and was busy educating patients about the effects of eating marijuana rather than smoking it.
She offered snickerdoodles, chocolate fudge, triple chocolate cake, and fish and oyster stew mix for $5. Her hashish lollipops quickly sold out, but there were plenty of spiced tea bags and canisters of marijuana lotion.
“This is a central location for all people who have cannabis products but don’t have a store front,” said Parkins, 54.
She said she has been cooking for medical marijuana patients for nine years, is working on a cookbook and even gives talks at cancer institutions.
Although everyone seemed to relish the mellow vibe inside the market, at least one vendor admitted that he had been nervous bringing in his products.
“I was kind of paranoid coming down here,” said Greg, who offered a smile but no last name. “You’ve gotta worry. It’s still marijuana.”
Many of the patients there to shop appeared to be in their 20s. But several others said they were in their 50s or 60s. Some used canes to walk, and at least one man came in a wheelchair.
Ric Smith said he began using medical marijuana after first being diagnosed with HIV. In addition, he uses pot to treat leukemia, kidney failure and help with a recent stroke.
He’s fond of saying, “Munchies save lives.” Marijuana “helped me to eat,” Smith said. “With all the operations and procedures and side effects, I had no appetite. Munchies saved my life.”

Lexington, KY – The Hemp Revolution, a documentary film about the multi-faceted hemp plant, will be shown at 6:45 p.m. on Monday, September 27th, in the downtown Lexington Public Library.
After the screening, Kentucky State Senator Joey Pendleton, D-Hopkinsville, along with Craig Lee, a member of the Kentucky Commission on Industrial Hemp, and Republican gubernatorial candidate, Phil Moffett, will address issues regarding industrial hemp’s potential for Kentucky farms and businesses.
Another Kentucky gubernatorial candidate, Gatewood Galbraith, a long time advocate of industrial hemp, appears in the film, which features many scientists, farmers, economists and other professionals and activists expressing observations and views. The sponsor of the showing, The Good Foods Market, offers the documentary as part of a monthly film series dedicated to issues of health, the environment and human rights.
Produced in 1996, The Hemp Revolution takes a broad view of the plant, which has two distinct profiles: industrial hemp and marijuana. Industrial hemp is not a drug crop because of its extremely low THC content, whereas the marijuana varieties have THC at levels which put them on the drug schedule. The Good Foods Market and the scheduled speakers all make it clear that they are only advocating industrial hemp, and the film concerns itself in large part with industrial hemp.
Sen. Pendleton has represented the state’s third district, comprised of Christian, Logan and Todd Counties, since 1992. The district economy is largely driven by agriculture, much of it very diversified. Pendleton says some big farms want to bring even more diversity into the area’s agricultural portfolio with the cultivation of industrial hemp. Among those cited by Pendleton as holding a keen interest in hemp is Phillip Garnett of the 20,000 acre Garnett Farms.
“Eighty-five percent of hemp raised in Canada is exported to the U.S.,” says Pendleton. He questions why American farmers can’t be serving that market. “We’re looking at what I think would be a four or five hundred million dollar industry (for Kentucky.) We raised it (hemp) during the war years (World War II) in Western Kentucky. It’s proven that we can raise it and raise it well.” He points out that bio-fuel programs have been criticized for diverting food crops to fuel production, as with corn for ethanol. “Hemp produces twice as much ethanol as corn per acre,” he said. He also sees the potential to draw more manufacturing jobs and corporate offices to Kentucky with the presence of industrial hemp crops in the state.
Since the early 1990s, Craig Lee has been active organizing, lobbying, speaking, and educating for the reintroduction of industrial hemp into Kentucky agriculture. He will bring his stories and some products to add to a hemp product display table that the Good Foods Market will set up. Terri Fann, Good Foods board member, says that a display table of hemp products will include car parts, plastic, food, building materials, oil (both fuel and food), clothing and paper products.
Phil Moffett, recently added as a speaker to the event, is making industrial hemp a major issue in his gubernatorial campaign. He will speak about his perspectives on hemp.
The presentation will run until 9 p.m. and will include an open discussion.

When it comes to legalizing pot, there’s no stemming the inevitable. Whatever happens this November with California’s Proposition 19, which essentially would decriminalize the drug, marijuana will end up being legit.
Whether you like it or not.
Jerry Brown and Barack Obama are against it – improbably, given their histories. Financier George Soros and Men’s Wearhouse thread peddler George Zimmer are for it. Libertarians, a colleague reminded me, “are just Republicans who smoke pot.”
But politics often are irrelevant when cultural tectonic plates are shifting.
Walk into the chic, slickly modern shop at Eighth and Mission, past the doorwoman. Eugene, a personal shopper consultant, waves at you from behind the counter. The white oak cabinetry looks as comfy and rich as caramel.
Merchandise is stored in apothecary jars with scripted labels. Data about the day’s best offerings scroll across high-tech LED displays.
Inside the stylishly lit custom display cases, you’d expect Prada, Cartier or Hermes. But it’s just clumps of pot – medical marijuana, in this case, cosseted up like exotic eggs.
This is SPARC (San Francisco Patient and Resource Center), a nonprofit, community-minded medical marijuana dispensary. But in the reflection of the slightly smoked windows, with a design that mimics the cannabis gene, you can also see weed’s upscale commercial future.
“Venture capitalists are certainly reaching out, trying to figure out what the world will look like in six months,” SPARC lawyer and consultant David Owen told me. “I have no doubt if and when recreational cannabis becomes legal that business will attract people with money.”
Pot derivatives could be the new plastics. Everyone ends up loaded.
“I had to take a cash (cultivation) business and make it legitimate after George Bush left office,” says SPARC co-owner and longtime grower Erich Pearson, who also runs an Oakland group that pairs local pot dispensaries with “socially conscious” investors.
The earth is moving in rural areas as well. “Serious people trying to start a niche market as brokers” approached Kathleen Archer, a TV producer who spent a year outside Healdsburg growing product for medical outlets. One was a woman who had worked 20 years for Brooks Bros. clothiers.
Nothing says unavoidable like a trend that has become truly trendy.
Down in Soquel, outside Santa Cruz, a dispensary is offering pot-infused ice cream. Crème de Canna. Really. There are now ganja yoga classes with joints to help limber up your joints before class.
And any modern trend needs a social media component. Seshroulette is a new, anonymous, live video-chatting service that allows you to talk with a stream of other stoned people. PriceofWeed.com is a website that crowdsources the going prices of pot in cities everywhere and charts them on a Google map.
This is a fun trip. But if California is first to have a crime-free sativa tea party all its own, “We’ll have to go back to the drawing board,” says SPARC’s Peterson. That recalculation includes billions in potential tax revenues to a strangling state budget.
Ironically, the people who will get most hosed by legal pot are the poor who really need it for serious pain and suffering, not for recreational gelato. Those down-and-outers will still be taxed on what they pay for.
What’s the ’60s saying? Pot will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no pot.

SANTA CRUZ – By his count, Don Ivey, 56, should have been dead six times by now.
The artisan and former competitive in-line skater survived both a stabbing and a scuba diving accident as a young man. Fifteen years ago, he was diagnosed with AIDS and hepatitis C. Five years ago, he crashed a motorcycle, landing facedown, partially paralyzed, in an ocean bay.
Recently, just 30 days removed from his second emergency room visit for internal bleeding and vomiting blood, Ivey walked up a terraced marijuana garden that is a medicinal and spiritual refuge for the sick, injured and dying.
Rising above rows of English lavender and shielded by a crescent-shaped ridge in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the pot garden for the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana is an icon in the history of the California marijuana movement.
The garden survives despite a 2002 raid – and seizure of the crop – by heavily armed federal agents. It thrives amid an aura of death, as members reap the harvest while grieving for those who succumb to terminal illnesses.
“Love grows here,” Ivey said, plucking unwanted yellowish leaves from the pot plants and stuffing them into his paralyzed hand, permanently balled into a fist. “This is not a pot club. This is a group of people who are doing it for each other, for real compassion.”
Organized as a cannabis-growing commune, WAMM planted its garden three years before California voters approved Proposition 215, the 1996 law that legalized marijuana for medical use. Its members, including cancer, AIDS and other seriously ill patients, sow, harvest and share the crop.
Founders Mike Corral, 60, and his wife, Valerie, 58, started growing marijuana to relieve seizures Valerie began to suffer after a car accident. They thought their simple garden – and its authentic marijuana-growing collective – would become the model for medical cultivation and distribution.
Instead, medical marijuana in California has boomed with pseudo-retail “collectives” peddling designer cannabis strains and handling millions of dollars in transactions. A $1 billion dispensary trade serves a vast range of marijuana users – and ailments generally far less serious than the life-altering challenges at WAMM.
“I think we were naive to think that this wouldn’t happen. This is America. Capitalism reigns supreme,” Mike Corral said. “We’re a socialist organization trying to exist in a capitalist world.”

Death a constant presence

California voters are poised to vote on a November initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational use. But WAMM members say they will continue to operate as always, no matter the outcome.
The group’s 225 members hold meetings to distribute their marijuana based on medical need and ability to pay. In a “design for dying” program, they organize bedside vigils and assistance for those in their final days of life.
Since its inception, 223 members have died from illnesses or medical conditions whose symptoms they had alleviated with marijuana.
High above the garden, a surfboard, urns, quartz rocks and Buddhist figures mark buried ashes of 17 members. Others are commemorated on painted rocks nearby – or in hundreds of photographs that fill walls of the collective’s offices in downtown Santa Cruz.
“Death is a daily part of life in WAMM,” said Sheri Paris, a former UC Santa Cruz creative writing professor and WAMM member now disabled with a brain condition.
“People who talk about this as a pretext to get high should look at the pictures on the wall,” she said, puffing on a marijuana cigarette in the WAMM office, a regimen she says quells her seizures. “The government would have you think that people are coming here for hangnails. If they’re faking it, they’re faking it to the point of dying.”
WAMM’s medical adviser, Santa Cruz physician Dr. Arnold Leff, is a former deputy director of the White House office of drug abuse under President Richard Nixon. He began treating HIV and AIDS patients in 1985, and soon recommended marijuana to ease their anxiety, nausea and pain from nerve damage.
He says marijuana isn’t an appropriate remedy for everyone. But he said: “You take terminally ill people and you put them in this environment and the bottom line is they feel better and live longer.”
Up in the garden, Don Ivey penned his name on a nursery tag for a flowering marijuana plant he put in the ground months ago with a shovel he can cradle with but one arm.
“It has given my life purpose,” he said. “If you don’t have purpose, you start listening to that communication between your ears that it is all gloom and doom and you’re going to die. Now I look forward to every day I’m alive. And I’ve always wanted to be a pot grower.”

DEA raid leads to standoff

Law enforcement authorities weren’t eager to accept WAMM’s marijuana garden.
Shortly before the Corrals established the collective, Santa Cruz County deputies arrested the couple for illegal cultivation over five plants they were growing for Valerie’s seizures. She filed California’s first known “medical necessity” defense for marijuana. The district attorney ultimately refused to prosecute.
But on Sept. 5, 2002, a decade after 77 percent of voters in liberal Santa Cruz County approved a local medical marijuana initiative and nearly six years after Californians approved Proposition 215, dozens of DEA agents swooped in on the WAMM site.
In the widely publicized incident, agents rousted sleeping medical marijuana patients from houses and detained and handcuffed Mike and Valerie Corral at gunpoint. With chain saws, they cut down 167 harvest-ready plants and packed up the crop.
Korean War veteran and former Santa Cruz clothing manufacturer Harold “Hal” Margolin, then 70, went to the scene. The heart patient, who used the marijuana for pain after back surgery left him nearly crippled, remembers weeping.
“They had come with a heavy hand to show us that we were not going to be able to do this. And they were teaching us a lesson,” he said.
DEA agents, enforcing federal laws against marijuana cultivation, ordered Margolin and other WAMM members to retreat. They did – but then chained and padlocked a gate at the entrance to the property, trapping the authorities inside.
A tense standoff played out before a swarm of media. WAMM followers refused to allow the government convoy and U-Hauls of seized pot to leave until receiving word on the fate of Mike and Valerie Corral. From a San Jose federal detention facility, Valerie Corral told the WAMM members to let the agents leave.
Federal prosecutors filed no charges. But the raid stirred a political fury and newfound sympathy for the medical marijuana movement.
“I thought the DEA was out of its mind,” said former state Assemblyman John Vasconcellos, who a year later authored state legislation implementing guidelines to allow marijuana cultivation and distribution under Proposition 215. “We had wars going on and violent crime. And they were raiding people in pain.”
The city and county of Santa Cruz joined a WAMM lawsuit to protect its right to cultivate marijuana. In 2004, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel issued an injunction barring federal incursions on the WAMM site.
Late last year, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the U.S. Justice Department would no longer target legal medical marijuana operations in states permitting medicinal use. This January, WAMM settled its lawsuit against the government with an agreement to refile the case if it is targeted again.

Diverse range of patients

In the eight years since the raid, Margolin, now 78, had a heart attack – his second – and was diagnosed with leukemia. His injured back gradually moved him from “a cane to a walker to a wheelchair.”
He took frequent, daily puffs of marijuana, calculating just enough, he said, to reduce his pain without feeling overly impaired. As his health deteriorated, he began cultivating pot at home to supply other collective members.
“The first year, they said, ‘Don’t bother.’ It wasn’t any good,” he said. “The second year, the pot was pretty damn good. I learned how to do it. I talked to the plants – every day.”
At one recent WAMM members meeting, patients including a blind woman with a guide dog and several people in wheelchairs showed up to get their medicine – dried marijuana packed in plastic bags and placed in manila envelopes.
Seth Prettol, 30, a Modesto resident and San Jose State University engineering student paralyzed in a fall from a rope swing near Yosemite, made it to the meeting after a long absence. He used to work in the garden, grinding marijuana leaves in his wheelchair for use in skin creams said to have anti-inflammatory properties and liquid elixirs touted as an alternative to smoking.
He was cheered as he rolled into the room. But he was tense with muscle spasms. Danny Rodriques, 61, an AIDS patient and former San Francisco barkeep, massaged Prettol’s shoulders.
The members discussed a “WAMMfest” community festival to raise money for the group, which operates on an annual budget of $165,000.
Mike Corral gave the weekly garden report. “The garden is beautiful,” he said.

WAMM now ‘my family’

The next Thursday morning, former auto detailer Jose Valencia, 46, a lymphoma patient, and ex-Amador County paramedic Pete Herzog, 50, who has Lyme disease, rose early to cut weeds and brush from the mountain grave sites of WAMM members.
Below, amid wafting marijuana smoke, others readied for shifts in the garden in a work room brimming with freshly painted memorial stones.
One rock was for Maria Lucinda “Lucy” Garcia, a former Santa Cruz hairdresser and make-up artist who came to WAMM dying from ovarian cancer. She became a fixture in the garden but was uncomfortable about the pot she smoked to alleviate her nausea.
“She never smoked in front of her daughter,” Valerie Corral said. “She was very clear in delineating the lines.”
When Garcia died, WAMM members dressed her in a long red gown. Valerie Corral did her hair and nails. At Garcia’s request, Corral adopted her daughter, Shana Conti, now 19.
Now, Hal Margolin says his moment is near. His leukemia has advanced to a terminal stage.
He is in an acute care unit at Santa Cruz’s Dominican Hospital for a broken hip. He’s being visited by his wife and children and deluged with cards from WAMM members preparing to help him upon his release from the hospital.
“My family is called WAMM,” Margolin said. “I don’t know if it will go down in history or not. But if it does, the story will be that we did it the right way.”

Marijuana advocates gather today, Saturday September 18, 2010 for an event popularly known as Hempfest Boston. The event held at the Boston Commons, features music, discussion and a whole lot of smoking. Massachusetts decriminalized the possession of an ounce or less of pot in 2009. Anyone caught with that amount only gets a $100 ticket (minors must also perform community service). The contrast between this law and the state’s blue laws has been the subject of much debate because it’s such a contrast. Gambling is also illegal in Massachusetts, and most people simply cannot reconcile the relaxed attitude toward a mood-altering street drug with the laws restricting alcohol and gambling. Be that as it may, the MassCan Organization’s yearly rally (which is what Hempfest Boston 2010 really is) seems to have worked in their favor, as they can now carry small amounts of cannabis on their persons anytime, anywhere in the state without fear of jail.
Image courtesy of bostonhempfest.com

by Bryce Wolfe
While the United States continues to ban the cultivation of industrial hemp because of its relationship to marijuana, other countries recognize the plant’s considerable economic and environmental benefits. The soft, hardy fiber can be found in paper, clothing and, increasingly, in houses. In the United Kingdom, Bath University researchers have constructed a building dubbed the “HemPod” in order to test the suitability of hemp as a building material.
The walls of the one-story HemPod consist of a hemp-lime mixture, made from the chopped core of the industrial hemp plant and a lime-based binder. The lime-based binder sticks to and protects the hemp fibers, making the material resistant to fire. Besides being drought- and pest-resistant, industrial hemp absorbs carbon dioxide as it grows and can be sustainably harvested. According to researchers, a soccer field-sized area can grow enough hemp in three months to build a typical three-bedroom house. The rest of the plant, like its seeds, can then be used for food or oil.
Hemp houses already exist in countries like Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, but the HemPod will be used purely for scientific testing. Researchers plan to monitor the house for 18 months using temperature and humidity sensors within its walls, to determine how quickly heat and water vapor pass through the material.
Ashville, North Carolina residents Russ Martin and Karon Korp can vouch for its insulating power. Last month CNN interviewed the couple, who own the first house in America constructed mainly from hemp materials, and Martin reported that the monthly cooling bill for the 3400 sq. ft. building was only $100. In appearance, the Ashville building is sleek and modern, dispelling the tie-dye stereotypes that surround hemp.