I just wanted to tell you about a new book called "Dying to Get High," by Wendy Chapkis and Rick Webb.
The book is about WAMM, as a collective and organization, and the laws surrounding medical marijuana. It's a really thorough and honest book, which is refreshing.
It's an excellent book that has got some good reviews. Here are some reviews and interviews:
Quote:
Dying to Get High
By PAUL KRASSNER
Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine is an important and accessible book--not heavy on academic jargon, but rather lively and engaging, like a true detective novel--with a broad appeal to those interested in the medical potential of cannabis, an end to the drug war and grass roots activism. I asked the co-authors how working on the book changed them.
WENDY CHAPKIS: “I certainly was one of those people who thought that ‘medical marijuana’ was probably mostly a way for Americans to get around ridiculously punitive drug laws. It seemed like a reasonable strategy to me. But the very first time I walked into a WAMM [WoMen’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana] membership meeting, looked around the room and saw people who were ghostly white and frail, people in wheelchairs, people huddled in small groups talking about a WAMM member who needed round the clock care, I realized that medical marijuana was no ‘ruse.’ These were very ill people. And, as I started doing interviews, the stories of the medicinal properties of pot blew me away.
“I wasn’t the only one surprised to discover that marijuana did in fact have therapeutic effects. Many patients were equally astonished. Like me, they had been recreational users who appreciated the pleasurable effects of marijuana and were suspicious of the claim that the herb was medicine. Then they started chemotherapy, for example, found themselves fighting off non-stop nausea, took a hit and the nausea disappeared. Or they had intolerable nerve pain from multiple sclerosis, AIDS or post-polio syndrome, used some cannabis tincture and the pain quieted down. It was funny how surprised we all were that it really worked.
“I think this shows how effective drug-war propaganda really is. Even (or maybe especially) people who are very familiar with marijuana are prepared to believe that it doesn’t really work as a medicine. Of course, since the discovery of the cannabinoid receptor system in the body (and the production of endogenous cannabinoids), scientists haven't been at all surprised at the medical properties of the plant--which I guess helps explain why the feds have been so reluctant to allow any scientific research.
“In any case, this research really transformed my understanding of the effects of cannabis--including enriching my understanding of the therapeutic effects of the so-called ‘high.’ The chapter on the high is one of my favorites because I think even the medical marijuana movement tends to downplay the psychoactive properties of the drug. They talk a lot about relief of ocular pressure, anti-nausea properties and the effect of cannabis on AIDS-wasting and relief of neuropathic pain, but there is very little discussion of the ways in which the psychoactive effects contribute to a sense of wellness for those who are seriously ill. And that is no small thing.”
RICHARD WEBB: “Working with the WAMM has, indeed, been a transformative experience. I have learned a great deal, and formed some of the most cherished and important relationships of my lifetime, but perhaps the most profound change for me has been the development of a new awareness of the importance of compassion and forgiveness. Two events epitomize the many experiences that led to this change.
“The Gay Pride festival in San Francisco has been one of WAMM’s most successful annual fundraising events. One year, I was working T-shirt sales, and when I turned my back for a moment, someone in the crowd stole a pile of shirts. Angry at the perpetrators and embarrassed about my carelessness, I told Valerie Corral, WAMM’s executive director, about it, and all she said was, ‘Well, let's hope they get a good price for them, because they must need the money very badly.” Val's forgiveness was like an epiphany, a moment I will never forget. It was as if a lifetime of blame and resentment had been lifted from my heart, and I became suddenly aware of the deep suffering that drives some people to behave badly.
“When I began my research on WAMM, one of the first people I got close to was an HIV patient named John Taylor. As a result of his illness, John was desperately poor and physically debilitated, but he retained a sense of humor and joie de vivre that made him a pleasure to be around. We eventually became best friends, and when at last John's struggle against the disease became futile, I turned my living room into a hospice facility and, with the assistance of many WAMM members--most of whom were trying to manage their own devastating ailments--I was able to provide John with a safe and comfortable place to live out his final ten weeks.
“These experiences, and many others of a similar nature, have almost completely altered my view of the world, my sense of who I am, and my beliefs about what is most important in life.”
Meanwhile, Barack Obama promises he would curb federal enforcement on state medical mariuana suppliers. John McCain has actually ridiculed patients who pleaded for more compassionate policies.
In "Dying to Get High," sociologists Wendy Chapkis and Richard Webb have written a sympathetic yet academically rigorous account of the contemporary controversies surrounding medical marijuana. They trace the use of marijuana as medicine in the US, its decline as a medicine in the early 20th Century, its removal from the pharmacopeia in 1941 (just four years after it was banned by federal law), the continuing blockage of research into its medical benefits by ideologically-driven federal authorities, and the renaissance of medical marijuana knowledge today, much of it derived from -- gasp! -- patients, not doctors or researchers.
As sociologists, Chapkis and Webb have a keen eye for the broader social, cultural, and political forces surrounding the issue of medical marijuana, from the rise of the pharmaceutical and medical establishments to the "culture war" contempt for marijuana and users among many Americans. But as much as middle America may disdain pot-smoking hippies, it seems that it is marijuana's location on the wrong side of the modern scientific and pharmaceutical discourse that most hinders its acceptance as a medicine.
Pot is a plant, not a pill. It is an herbal medication, not a chemical compound. It is a "crude plant material," not a "pure drug." All of this, Chapkis and Webb suggest, make it difficult indeed for the medical and scientific establishment to wrap its head around medical marijuana. And when scientific bias is coupled with cultural disdain and fear of widespread "abuse," that the federal government remains resistant to medical marijuana is hardly a surprise.
Chapkis and Webb deliver a resounding, well-reasoned indictment of the political and (pseudo) scientific opposition to medical marijuana, and their succinct discussion of the issues surrounding the controversy is worth the price of admission.
But "Dying to Get High" is also an in-depth portrait of one of the country's most well-known medical marijuana collectives, the Wo/Men's Access to Medical Marijuana (WAMM) collective in Santa Cruz, California, and it is here that the authors are really breaking new ground. They go from the big-picture sociology of medical marijuana in the past century to narrowly focus on ethnography of a patient collective, describing in loving detail the inner workings, dynamics, and tensions of a group with charismatic leadership -- Mike and Valerie Corral -- more than 200 seriously ill patients, and the specter of the DEA always looming.
Their account of the emergence and permanence of WAMM is both moving and enlightening. Rooted in the fertile soil of Santa Cruz, already well-tilled by previous social movements such as feminism, gay rights, and AIDS activism, WAMM may only have been possible in a place that friendly to radical movements and that familiar with activism around issues of medical care and social justice. Chapkis and Webb chart its formation, its growth, its conflicts and problems, and the humanity of its suffering members.
They also tell the story of the 2002 DEA raid on the WAMM garden and its devastating impact on members. But that raid and its aftermath were not just a blow to the sick and dying, they were a call to arms, impelling WAMM into ever more overtly political action to protect itself and the broader movement.
More broadly, Chapkis and Webb do a great service by dissecting WAMM, looking at how it works, how it handles dysfunction, and how it provides a service far beyond mere medical marijuana to its members. WAMM is perhaps the model medical marijuana collective, and it has many lessons to offer the interested reader.
Would a WAMM-style collective work elsewhere? Chapkis and Webb emphasize the importance of the cultural and political backdrop in Santa Cruz in making WAMM possible, but I think the very emergence of WAMM as a successful collective makes the possibility of similar collectives coming into being elsewhere all the more likely. After all, even California as a whole is not as radicalized as Santa Cruz or San Francisco, but similar collectives are popping up in Santa Rosa and the San Fernando Valley, among other places.
In any case, Chapkis and Webb provide plenty to chew on, for those who want to pick up some historical knowledge and debating points, for those interested in the genesis of the contemporary marijuana movement, and for those who are pondering the viability of similarly radical approaches to health and self-organizing.
A Chance for Change?
“Dying to Get High,” by academics from opposite coasts: Maine Sociologist Wendy Chapkis and California Communications Professor Richard Webb, is an exceptionally interesting and informative hybrid that combines a well-documented look at the academic and legal underpinnings of American drug policy with the arresting human interest story of how patients suffering from a variety of debilitating, often fatal, conditions were arbitrarily punished for their use of “medical marijuana” by the same federal bureaucracy that has been both prosecuting the drug war and shamelessly lobbying on behalf of its necessity as policy.
At this point it’s necessary to acknowledge the intensely political nature of medical marijuana, the subject Chapkis and Webb have chosen to deal with in a well researched and commendably even handed manner. Their introduction explains how they came to collaborate on the project despite quite different backgrounds; both also admit to prior acquaintance with various WAMM members, and that they also harbored biases against official policy without necessarily agreeing on all issues. It's precisely because of such full disclosure, extensive documentation, scrupulously even-handed style and the DEA’s own treatment of WAMM patients that all but the most partisan readers should be convinced that not only is cannabis (“marijuana”) medicine, but our government’s continuing insistence on its prohibition, mindless even when first enacted in 1937, has done enormous damage since it was intensified in 1970, and is now nothing less than an embarrassment.
This book is scholarly, but also very readable; it’s efficiently laid out in eight short, but densely annotated chapters that shift back and forth between an academic history of American drug policy from 1914 to the present and the intensely human story of WAMM, especially as its members were affected by the military style early morning raid the DEA carried out in September 2002
WAMM (Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana) is a Santa Cruz, California cooperative with roots traceable to a 1973 injury sustained by one of its founders, Valerie Leveroni, then a young college student, who was nearly killed when a light plane buzzed her car and caused it to roll over. The accident produced a severe head injury that left her with crippling headaches and a seizure disorder resistant to conventional treatment. The following year, after her fiance, Michael Corral, read about marijuana’s success in controlling seizures in patients with epilepsy, they decided to try it. Over the ensuing months, Valerie was restored to a level of physical and intellectual function she hadn’t thought possible.
Fast forward to 1992; the Corrals, then long married and living a quiet life in Davenport, just north of Santa Cruz. had a garden in which they grew flowers, vegetables, and Valerie’s medicine. Local police had chosen to ignore their few pot plants until they were spotted in a helicopter fly-over by an outside police agency and the local prosecutor elected to file charges. The Corrals were offered a plea bargain in which charges would be dropped in return for a promise not to use pot, but that was a condition Valerie felt she couldn’t accept. It was also a time of increasing pressure on the DEA and its parent Justice Department to reschedule marijuana as a “schedule two” agent, but they had adamantly refused, even to the point of overruling their own administrative law judge and dismantling a “medical necessity” program started under President Carter and continued for a while under George H. W. Bush.
Over a protracted interval, the ongoing stalemate between federal agencies and patients caused tensions to escalate gradually and finally generated Proposition 215, California’s ballot initiative. Because the members of WAMM were among the sickest medical users, they were (mistakenly, as it turned out) assumed by most to be the only acceptable model for “valid” use, even as the feds were insisting there is no such thing.
In fact, as a careful reading of the references assembled for this study makes quite clear, the behavior of our federal bureaucracy has been breath-takingly dishonest and punitive in every situation in which the issue of medical use has ever come up.
Although medical marijuana laws have been passed by several other states since 1996, none have attracted the attention of California’s nor generated so much intrusion from the federal bureaucracy. While “Dying to Get High” doesn’t explicitly call attention to that differential federal interest, it leaves little doubt that it exists and raises its own implicit questions about policy bias.
After a jury refused to convict Valerie Corral following her 1992 arrest, she and Michael became increasing visible as symbols and their lives have been irrevocably changed by their courageous advocacy. What I have learned from working on a similarly opportunistic, but differently framed, study of pot use in a very different setting than WAMM, has been that the “traditional” arguments that have raged between medical marijuana advocates and the DEA have been false. Ironically, that’s because of false assumptions made by both sides about “recreational” use. Equally ironically, the “high’ referred to in Chapkis and Webb's title isn’t intoxication; it’s a brief, precisely controlled anxiolytic state produced by pot when it’s inhaled one that's therapeutically very useful for those suffering from the increasingly common symptoms of anxiety now besetting our species. In fact, it was the appeal of inhaled pot for the first baby boomers that triggered its sudden popularity with them while inducing Richard Nixon to declare “war” on drugs. The pot market has been unstoppable over the ensuing forty years since Nixon closed the Mexican Border for Operation intercept in 1969, but futile federal attempts to suppress it have done enormous damage to the lives of over twenty million (mostly young) people arrested in support of those attempts.
Parenthetically, the financial debacle the world is now struggling with presents all humans with a similar dilemma: how do we create and maintain an acceptably honest regulatory effort with enough transparency to hold (the inevitable) cheating to an acceptable level?
Although Proposition 215 passed comfortably in 1996 and its basic premise— that marijuana has medical value— is now supported in polls by eighty percent of Americans, the law is still stubbornly resisted within California by state and federal police agencies that are colluding to harass, arrest, and prosecute credentialed patients to the extent they can get away with. They are being aided and abetted in those tactics by a prevailing media bias that considers most cannabis use, especially by youth, as “recreational” and thus fair game for law enforcement.
Nevertheless, as the state’s medical gray market has gradually become more robust and more visible, the California experience is posing a threat to a policy once considered invulnerable.
Chapkis and Webb have focused on local terrain they were both personally familiar with; in so doing, they have produced an accurate and detailed history of the pertinent policy issues. Ideal timing gives their readable account of the WAMM fiasco a real chance to make a difference in our (changed) Presidential climate.
11-07-2008, 11:26 AM
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