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Today, \u201cequity\u201d is a watchword in the cannabis legalization movement, as state and local governments try to craft models for an adult-use market designed to correct the social harms of prohibition and the War on Drugs. But this public consciousness is due to the work of many who pushed the issue long before doing so was entirely socially acceptable.<\/p>\n
Sister Somayah Kambui, a veteran Black Panther turned cannabis advocate, was one of those who brought issues of racial justice to the forefront of the cannabis movement. And before her untimely death, she won a groundbreaking \u201cjury nullification\u201d victory, upholding her right to provide cannabis to treat sickle-cell anemia.<\/p>\n
Sister Somayah, as she was ubiquitously known (she was born Renee Moore), used cannabis to treat sickle-cell anemia, under the terms of California\u2019s Proposition 215 medical marijuana measure after its passage in 1996. But her vocal advocacy made her a target of the authorities \u2014 resulting in her unprecedented legal victory.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sickle-cell anemia<\/a>\u00a0is a genetic blood anomaly that occurs in one in every 70,000 Americans, particularly those of African descent. It can cause debilitating pain, fatigue and swelling of the hands and feet. It took Kambui a while to figure out that cannabis was the most effective treatment for her.<\/p>\n Kambui was a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, where she served several years during the Vietnam era. At VA and public hospitals, she was given morphine for her pain from the disease.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI couldn\u2019t do anything on the morph,\u201d she\u00a0told High Times reporter Peter Gorman<\/a>. \u201cAnd neither can a million other people. That\u2019s why you see so many middle aged and older black folk sitting on stoops looking like junkies. They are junkies. They\u2019re U.S. government junkies.\u201d<\/p>\n After finding that cannabis helped, and after the passage of Prop 215, she founded the\u00a0Crescent Alliance Self Help for Sickle Cell<\/a>\u00a0collective, or \u201cbuyers\u2019 club.\u201d With a doctor\u2019s recommendation, she began cultivating in her South Los Angeles backyard.<\/p>\n But the police raided her garden in October 2001 and confiscated, by their estimate, 200 pounds of cannabis plants.\u00a0<\/p>\n The LAPD brought in a helicopter for the raid, menacing the block of single-family homes.<\/p>\n \u201cI was sitting having a cup of coffee with a little hemp oil when they broke down the door,\u201d Kambui told the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/a>. \u201cI said, \u2018I\u2019m legal, I have a doctor\u2019s note and I\u2019m compliant with the law.’\u201d<\/p>\n She said the officers told her she had too much for her personal use. \u201cI said \u2018OK, why don\u2019t you take what you think I don\u2019t need and leave me the rest?’\u201d she recalled to the LA Times. \u201cThey took it all.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n She also disputed the police estimate of the haul. \u201cThat is 200 pounds wet, with dirt and stalks,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Kambui was arrested, spent 60 days in jail and was charged with multiple felonies including cultivation, sale and shipping marijuana out of state. Worse still, she was facing a life prison term under California\u2019s \u201cThree Strikes\u201d law. Her two prior convictions, involving illegal firearms possession and explosives, stemmed from her work with the Black Panthers in the early 1970s. During her time as a legendary Panther, she was known as \u201cPeaches,\u201d and\u00a0was a leader<\/a>\u00a0of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party, alongside Geronimo Pratt.<\/p>\n When she went before the judge at Los Angeles County Court in January 2002, Kambui said the cannabis was not for her use alone, but was to be shared with some dozen sickle-cell sufferers in her club. \u201cThey\u2019re all mine,\u201d she said, taking full responsibility for all the uprooted plants. She also admitted shipping to sufferers who were too far away to come see her.\u00a0<\/p>\n And she asserted that her advocacy had made her a target, noting that she\u2019d been similarly raided in 1998 \u2014 although the charges were dropped after she spent two weeks in jail.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Making a medical necessity defense, Kambui spoke to the court of the long centuries of medicinal cannabis use in African traditional healing. Using her own idiosyncratic lingo, she referred to the African continent as \u201cNigretia,\u201d and to her cannabis as \u201cNigretian Kif.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n The trial ended in an outcome that\u00a0The Leaf Online<\/a>\u00a0website hailed as a \u201cjury revolt or jury nullification,\u201d in which a defendant is\u00a0acquitted on moral or ethical grounds<\/a>, in spite of uncontested evidence that she or he acted as charged. On March 18, 2002, Sister Somayah Kambui was\u00a0found \u201cnot guilty\u201d of all charges<\/a>.<\/p>\n In addition to being a rare victory for the\u00a0doctrine of nullification<\/a>, Kambui\u2019s legal battle also anticipated a change in California law. It was the following year that the \u201cmedical marijuana collective defense<\/a>\u201d was enshrined in the\u00a0Medical Marijuana Program Act<\/a>, the notorious Senate Bill 420.\u00a0<\/p>\n By the time of her court case, Kambui was already a leading figure in Southern California\u2019s cannabis activist scene. She was the key mover behind the first\u00a0Los Angeles Global Marijuana March<\/a>\u00a0in 1999, and all the subsequent ones until her death. And she was particularly aggressive in calling out the cannabis community one what she saw as its internal racism \u2014 for instance, in failing to emphasize sickle-cell anemia in medical marijuana advocacy, and failing to make the link between prohibition and militarized policing of black and brown communities.<\/p>\n But she bridged a cultural divide in 1997, when she teamed up with B.E. Smith, a brazen and police-defying cannabis grower of white redneck roots in the backwoods of Northern California\u2019s Trinity Alps. Smith became \u201cdesignated caregiver\u201d for Kambui, among a handful of other medical users around the state. Alas, she never got to use B.E.\u2019s bud, as his cultivation site was raided by federal agents that harvest season\u2014resulting in his own landmark legal battle. Smith\u00a0died earlier this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, Kambui\u2019s run-ins with the law were not over after her court victory. In October 2003, her garden was again raided \u2014 this time by the DEA. A dozen plants were uprooted, although no charges were filed.\u00a0<\/p>\n California NORML<\/a>\u00a0coordinator Dale Gieringer\u00a0decried the raid<\/a>\u00a0as a \u201cmean-spirited, gratuitous attack on a seriously ill woman who has been judged guiltless by her peers under California law. Like other victims of DEA\u2019s medical marijuana raids, Somayah was targeted because she was a vocal, legal patient activist who was a thorn in the side of the law enforcement establishment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Like many front-line activists who put a commitment to community ahead of personal gain, Kambui received little material reward for her efforts. When she died on Thanksgiving 2008, at the age of 57, the website\u00a0Time4Hemp<\/a>\u00a0wrote that economic hard times likely contributed to her demise: \u201cMany close to her believe she died of a broken heart based on lack of financial support. All those dispensaries in Los Angeles and not one would help her save her home from foreclosure.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Twelve years after her passing, Sister Somayah Kambui reminds us of the need to preserve the memory of those who sacrificed for such freedom and consciousness as we have now achieved. And more poignantly, of the need to honor and support our freedom fighters while they still walk among us.\u00a0<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0what did you learn from Sister Somayah?<\/p>\n The post Sister Somayah Kambui: An Early Visionary of Cannabis Equity<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Today, \u201cequity\u201d is a watchword in the cannabis legalization movement, as state and local governments try to craft models for an adult-use market designed to correct the social harms of prohibition and the War on Drugs. But this public consciousness is due to the work of many who pushed theContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":41264,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2252,50,2462,320,13275],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41263"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41265,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41263\/revisions\/41265"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/SisterSomayahKambui.jpg\")
Pushing Racial Justice in the Cannabis Community\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Sister Somayah Kambui: An Early Visionary of Cannabis Equity<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"