SANTA CRUZ -- What do you do when you sue U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and win? Fifty-one-year-old Valerie Corral, a sinewy 5-foot-tall great-granddaughter of Italian immigrants, throws back her head laughing, her hands reaching to the clouds, hips wiggling, feet stomping.

"It’s my happy dance!" she says, throwing her arms around her husband, Mike.

She has also planted an acre of marijuana. The decision that lets the crop remain is just one round in a long legal battle.

Last month, a federal judge in San Jose issued a preliminary injunction banning the Justice Department, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, from interfering with the Corrals?pot garden, set above an ocean bluff near Davenport, about an hour south of San Francisco. The injunction gives the judge time to reconsider his earlier decision to allow the garden to be uprooted.

Still, the Corrals call the injunction a victory.

They share their harvest through the first legally recognized, nonprofit medical marijuana club in America, which they founded in 1993. The club has about 250 seriously ill members who have prescriptions from their doctors to use marijuana to alleviate their suffering, increase their appetites and control their seizures.

The San Jose ruling is one of a number challenging federal restrictions on medical marijuana, which has consistently won support in national opinion polls since 1995 but has had a mixed record in state ballot measures.

For now, the Corrals are the only people in the United States growing marijuana in their back yard backed by state law, a local ordinance and a federal judge’s injunction. And Valerie Corral has become a heroine to proponents of medical marijuana.

"This could be the moment of the beginning of the end of this insane war against the sick," said Bruce Mirken of the Washington D.C.-based advocacy group Marijuana Policy Project. "And while the DEA and the Justice Department characterize Valerie as a common drug dealer, all you have to do is spend two minutes with her to know that’s a lie."

During the past three decades, while sharing marijuana with sick people, Corral has watched -- and in many cases held -- 140 friends, ranging in age from 7 to 96, as they died of cancer, AIDS and other illnesses.

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