As we speak, “fairness” is a watchword within the hashish legalization motion, as state and native governments attempt to craft fashions for an adult-use market designed to appropriate the social harms of prohibition and the Conflict on Medicine. However this public consciousness is as a result of work of many who pushed the difficulty lengthy earlier than doing so was fully socially acceptable.
Sister Somayah Kambui, a veteran Black Panther turned hashish advocate, was a type of who introduced problems with racial justice to the forefront of the hashish motion. And earlier than her premature loss of life, she gained a groundbreaking “jury nullification” victory, upholding her proper to supply hashish to deal with sickle-cell anemia.
Sister Somayah, as she was ubiquitously recognized (she was born Renee Moore), used hashish to deal with sickle-cell anemia, underneath the phrases of California’s Proposition 215 medical marijuana measure after its passage in 1996. However her vocal advocacy made her a goal of the authorities — leading to her unprecedented authorized victory.
Sickle-cell anemia is a genetic blood anomaly that happens in a single in each 70,000 Individuals, notably these of African descent. It will possibly trigger debilitating ache, fatigue and swelling of the arms and toes. It took Kambui some time to determine that hashish was the simplest therapy for her.
Kambui was a veteran of the U.S. Air Pressure, the place she served a number of years through the Vietnam period. At VA and public hospitals, she was given morphine for her ache from the illness.
“I couldn’t do something on the morph,” she informed Excessive Occasions reporter Peter Gorman. “And neither can 1,000,000 different individuals. That’s why you see so many center aged and older black people sitting on stoops trying like junkies. They’re junkies. They’re U.S. authorities junkies.”
After discovering that hashish helped, and after the passage of Prop 215, she based the Crescent Alliance Self Assist for Sickle Cell collective, or “patrons’ membership.” With a physician’s suggestion, she started cultivating in her South Los Angeles yard.
However the police raided her backyard in October 2001 and confiscated, by their estimate, 200 kilos of hashish vegetation.
The LAPD introduced in a helicopter for the raid, menacing the block of single-family houses.
“I used to be sitting having a cup of espresso with a bit hemp oil once they broke down the door,” Kambui informed the Los Angeles Occasions. “I mentioned, ‘I’m authorized, I’ve a physician’s observe and I’m compliant with the regulation.’”
She mentioned the officers informed her she had an excessive amount of for her private use. “I mentioned ‘OK, why don’t you are taking what you suppose I don’t want and go away me the remaining?’” she recalled to the LA Occasions. “They took all of it.”
She additionally disputed the police estimate of the haul. “That’s 200 kilos moist, with grime and stalks,” she mentioned.
Kambui was arrested, spent 60 days in jail and was charged with a number of felonies together with cultivation, sale and delivery marijuana out of state. Worse nonetheless, she was going through a life jail time period underneath California’s “Three Strikes” regulation. Her two prior convictions, involving unlawful firearms possession and explosives, stemmed from her work with the Black Panthers within the early Seventies. Throughout her time as a legendary Panther, she was often called “Peaches,” and was a pacesetter of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Get together, alongside Geronimo Pratt.
When she went earlier than the decide at Los Angeles County Courtroom in January 2002, Kambui mentioned the hashish was not for her use alone, however was to be shared with some dozen sickle-cell victims in her membership. “They’re all mine,” she mentioned, taking full accountability for all of the uprooted vegetation. She additionally admitted delivery to victims who have been too distant to return see her.
And he or she asserted that her advocacy had made her a goal, noting that she’d been equally raided in 1998 — though the costs have been dropped after she spent two weeks in jail.
Making a medical necessity protection, Kambui spoke to the courtroom of the lengthy centuries of medicinal hashish use in African conventional therapeutic. Utilizing her personal idiosyncratic lingo, she referred to the African continent as “Nigretia,” and to her hashish as “Nigretian Kif.”
The trial led to an final result that The Leaf On-line web site hailed as a “jury revolt or jury nullification,” by which a defendant is acquitted on ethical or moral grounds, despite uncontested proof that he or she acted as charged. On March 18, 2002, Sister Somayah Kambui was discovered “not responsible” of all expenses.
Along with being a uncommon victory for the doctrine of nullification, Kambui’s authorized battle additionally anticipated a change in California regulation. It was the next yr that the “medical marijuana collective protection” was enshrined within the Medical Marijuana Program Act, the infamous Senate Invoice 420.
Pushing Racial Justice within the Hashish Neighborhood
By the point of her courtroom case, Kambui was already a number one determine in Southern California’s hashish activist scene. She was the important thing mover behind the primary Los Angeles World Marijuana March in 1999, and all the following ones till her loss of life. And he or she was notably aggressive in calling out the hashish neighborhood one what she noticed as its inside racism — as an example, in failing to emphasise sickle-cell anemia in medical marijuana advocacy, and failing to make the hyperlink between prohibition and militarized policing of black and brown communities.
However she bridged a cultural divide in 1997, when she teamed up with B.E. Smith, a brazen and police-defying hashish grower of white redneck roots within the backwoods of Northern California’s Trinity Alps. Smith grew to become “designated caregiver” for Kambui, amongst a handful of different medical customers across the state. Alas, she by no means acquired to make use of B.E.’s bud, as his cultivation web site was raided by federal brokers that harvest season—leading to his personal landmark authorized battle. Smith died earlier this yr.
Sadly, Kambui’s run-ins with the regulation weren’t over after her courtroom victory. In October 2003, her backyard was once more raided — this time by the DEA. A dozen vegetation have been uprooted, though no expenses have been filed.
California NORML coordinator Dale Gieringer decried the raid as a “mean-spirited, gratuitous assault on a significantly sick girl who has been judged guiltless by her friends underneath California regulation. Like different victims of DEA’s medical marijuana raids, Somayah was focused as a result of she was a vocal, authorized affected person activist who was a thorn within the facet of the regulation enforcement institution.”
Like many front-line activists who put a dedication to neighborhood forward of private acquire, Kambui acquired little materials reward for her efforts. When she died on Thanksgiving 2008, on the age of 57, the web site Time4Hemp wrote that financial laborious instances possible contributed to her demise: “Many near her consider she died of a damaged coronary heart based mostly on lack of economic assist. All these dispensaries in Los Angeles and never one would assist her save her dwelling from foreclosures.”
Twelve years after her passing, Sister Somayah Kambui reminds us of the necessity to protect the reminiscence of those that sacrificed for such freedom and consciousness as we have now now achieved. And extra poignantly, of the necessity to honor and assist our freedom fighters whereas they nonetheless stroll amongst us.
TELL US, what did you study from Sister Somayah?
