Sister Somayah Kambui: An Early Visionary of Cannabis Equity

Today, “equity” 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.

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 “jury nullification” victory, upholding her right to provide
cannabis to treat sickle-cell anemia.

Sister Somayah, as she was ubiquitously known (she was born Renee Moore),
used cannabis to treat sickle-cell anemia, under the terms of California’s
Proposition 215 medical marijuana measure after its passage in 1996. But
her vocal advocacy made her a target of the authorities — resulting in her
unprecedented legal victory.

Sickle-cell anemia is 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.

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.

“I couldn’t do anything on the morph,” she told High Times reporter Peter
Gorman. “And neither can a million other people. That’s why you see so many
middle aged and older black folk sitting on stoops looking like junkies.
They are junkies. They’re U.S. government junkies.”

After finding that cannabis helped, and after the passage of Prop 215, she
founded the Crescent Alliance Self Help for Sickle Cell collective, or
“buyers’ club.” With a doctor’s recommendation, she began cultivating in
her South Los Angeles backyard.

But the police raided her garden in October 2001 and confiscated, by their
estimate, 200 pounds of cannabis plants.

The LAPD brought in a helicopter for the raid, menacing the block of
single-family homes.

“I was sitting having a cup of coffee with a little hemp oil when they
broke down the door,” Kambui told the Los Angeles Times. “I said, ‘I’m
legal, I have a doctor’s note and I’m compliant with the law.'”

She said the officers told her she had too much for her personal use. “I
said ‘OK, why don’t you take what you think I don’t need and leave me the
rest?'” she recalled to the LA Times. “They took it all.”

She also disputed the police estimate of the haul. “That is 200 pounds wet,
with dirt and stalks,” she said.

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’s “Three
Strikes” 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
“Peaches,” and was a leader of the Southern California Chapter of the Black
Panther Party, alongside Geronimo Pratt.

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. “They’re all mine,” 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.

And she asserted that her advocacy had made her a target, noting that she’d
been similarly raided in 1998 — although the charges were dropped after she
spent two weeks in jail.

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
“Nigretia,” and to her cannabis as “Nigretian Kif.”
Sister Somayah Kambui

The trial ended in an outcome that The Leaf Online website hailed as a
“jury revolt or jury nullification,” in which a defendant is acquitted on
moral or ethical grounds, in spite of uncontested evidence that she or he
acted as charged. On March 18, 2002, Sister Somayah Kambui was found “not
guilty” of all charges.

In addition to being a rare victory for the doctrine of nullification,
Kambui’s legal battle also anticipated a change in California law. It was
the following year that the “medical marijuana collective defense” was
enshrined in the Medical Marijuana Program Act, the notorious Senate Bill
420.
*Pushing Racial Justice in the Cannabis Community *

By the time of her court case, Kambui was already a leading figure in
Southern California’s cannabis activist scene. She was the key mover behind
the first Los Angeles Global Marijuana March in 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
— 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.

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’s Trinity Alps. Smith became
“designated caregiver” for Kambui, among a handful of other medical users
around the state. Alas, she never got to use B.E.’s bud, as his cultivation
site was raided by federal agents that harvest season—resulting in his own
landmark legal battle. Smith died earlier this year.

Unfortunately, Kambui’s run-ins with the law were not over after her court
victory. In October 2003, her garden was again raided — this time by the
DEA. A dozen plants were uprooted, although no charges were filed.

California NORML coordinator Dale Gieringer decried the raid as a
“mean-spirited, gratuitous attack on a seriously ill woman who has been
judged guiltless by her peers under California law. Like other victims of
DEA’s 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.”

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 Time4Hemp wrote
that economic hard times likely contributed to her demise: “Many 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.”

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.

*TELL US,* what did you learn from Sister Somayah?

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