Peggy had just left the hospital when she went to visit her cannabis dealer in Denton. A retail cashier in her mid-60s, she was struggling to pay her bills and buy the drugs prescribed to treat an inoperable brain tumor. She needed the cannabis to give her an appetite when she began chemotherapy. The neutered, expensive but legal product then allowed under Texas’ highly restricted medical marijuana program would do little to help her.
Her cannabis dealer, Stanton Brasher, sold weed out of a small house in a cookie-cutter neighborhood on the north side of Denton. But he was no Felix Gallardo. He wielded a keyboard and an Xbox controller instead of guns. He was more like a character from Pineapple Express, laid back from the weed he smoked yet amped up on Adderall. He kept cannabis buds in Mason jars in a toolbox in his garage, not far from the reminders that he had a wife, a former teacher for Denton ISD, and kids. The family had once moved to California, where he says he set up a legal cannabis business, but his wife filed for divorce, and he returned to Texas and his old cannabis networks.
A former actor in the Denton comedy sketch group Sketchy People, Brasher was a familiar face in the local arts and music scene, working as a freelance writer for local publications such as the Denton Record-Chronicle, the Dallas Observer and Sofa King News, an entertainment website he created with a college friend. His cannabis clients included artists, childcare workers, educators, entrepreneurs, laborers, lawyers, medical professionals and veterans.
When Peggy told Brasher about her tumor diagnosis, he understood the relief she needed. One of his clients, a published comic book author, treated epilepsy with cannabis, which medical experts from the Epilepsy Foundation say helps reduce seizures.
“So, of course, I gave her free weed for the rest of her life, which was only a few months,” Brasher told five Denton City Council members at a meeting in early November. “I would often wonder when patients like her and others would leave my house, what happens if they get pulled over? Are we going to pull a 65-year-old cancer patient out of their car, search them with the dogs, search their purse, put them in handcuffs and take them to jail, strip them, search them, make them sleep on an uncomfortable bed with a scratchy blanket, no pillow? That’s inhumane to me.”
At first glance, Brasher appears to be a solid choice as an advocate for marijuana reform in Denton. He’s an articulate college graduate with a master’s degree from Texas Woman’s University and an entrepreneur who’s owned a few small businesses. Plus, he knows the cannabis industry inside and out. He even has plans to get into the legal medical marijuana business in Oklahoma.
That last bit is the problem, though. Denton police have arrested Brasher twice for dealing cannabis. The first felony charge came in May 2018. Police raided his house and found between 5 to 50 pounds of marijuana flower. Fourteen months later, police pulled him over and caught him with, he says, about 100 illegal cannabis vaporizer cartridges. Police raided his house and found about a quarter pound of cannabis flower. They charged him with possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver, a first-degree felony.
“And it was that second arrest that really woke me…
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