Fight over, 'pot mom' makes plans to move from Minnesota

Angela Brown was ready for her day in court. Ready to fight a misdemeanor charge that she endangered her sick child by giving him a few drops of marijuana oil.

But days before the trial was to start, the county attorney dropped the charge, depriving Brown of a chance to defend her choice of treatment for her son — a choice that brought national attention and notoriety to the family and their hometown of Madison, Minn.

"I feel like I've been in a boxing ring for a whole year. I'm one punch away from a victory, and my opponent walks away," Brown said with an angry laugh. "They're just dismissing it like it never happened."

Now it's her family's turn to walk away. They plan to move to Colorado this summer, probably before Minnesota's medical marijuana law goes into effect on July 1. David Brown, a corrections officer, is lining up a new job, and 15-year-old Trey is studying up on horticulture, eager to grow marijuana plants for his treatment, as Colorado law allows.

"He is so excited," Angela Brown said. "It's like a shadow has been lifted."

Despite the changing laws here, the Browns say medical cannabis will be cheaper and more accessible in Colorado. Besides, they're ready to leave a town and a state that seem polarized by their case.

The three of them traveled to St. Paul this week to address a rally sponsored by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). It was part victory lap, part farewell tour.

Medical marijuana "was a miracle for our son," Angela Brown told a crowd at the NORML rally, noting that doctors tried 20 different drug therapies on Trey, without success. "I truly believe that if it weren't for that drug, our son would have taken his life."

The family's ordeal started in 2011, when Trey, then 11, took a line drive to the temple while pitching a baseball game. The blow caused a bleed in his brain that left him partly paralyzed and in an induced coma, with doctors pessimistic about his survival. Trey rallied, though, and eventually returned to school. But he remained wracked with pain, muscle spasms and behavior disorders caused both by the brain injury and the prescriptions he was given to treat it.

Sometimes, his parents said, Trey was in so much pain, he would lash out, breaking his own bones. He broke his collarbone and his hand. He bashed his head against the walls repeatedly, trying to knock out the pain. Sometimes he just sat there, rocking back and forth, muttering robotically: "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"It wasn't Trey. It just wasn't Trey," David Brown said. "It would go on for hours on end. I'll never forget it."

Trey couldn't sleep, so his parents couldn't sleep. The medicines affected his stomach, so he could barely eat. His parents were terrified to leave him alone, afraid of what might happen.

After a parade of doctors, neurologists, endocrinologists and therapists, one of their doctors suggested medical cannabis. They researched the treatment, then took a family vacation to Colorado.

They brought home a bottle of safflower and cannabis oil.

Trey took his first dose — five drops — and waited an hour and a half for it to kick in. When it did, "He melted. That's the best way to say it," Angela Brown said.

"He smiled. He laughed," David Brown said. "We hadn't seen that since the injury."

Then, they said, Trey, who hadn't been eating or sleeping, ate a bowl of cereal and went to bed, smiling.

"I was looking forward to the trial, just to watch it," said David Brown, who found himself on the receiving end of Internet insults from people who thought he should have offered to be prosecuted instead of his wife — even though an arrest would have cost him his job as a corrections officer. Angela Brown's work as a massage therapist had faltered with the demands of caring for Trey and her younger son, but it all but dried up after her case made the news.

The family scraped by with the help of donations. A fund­raiser when Trey was first injured brought in enough money to pay some of the bills, buy some of the groceries and buy a car sturdy enough to ferry him the 130 miles to doctor's appointments in Sioux Falls, S.D., the Browns said. A new GoFundMe account has brought in $25,000 more, which the family hopes will offset the cost of moving to Colorado.

Minnesota will legalize medical cannabis this summer — but it will be available only to patients with certain medical conditions, who can purchase it only as a pill or liquid and only from one of eight dispensaries around the state. The closest clinic to Madison will be in St. Cloud, two-and-a-half hours away. But the main factor in the family's move, Angela Brown said, is that the drug Trey will probably need to take for the rest of his life is much cheaper in Colorado: A one-month supply that might cost $500 in Minnesota sells for one-fifth of that in Colorado.

More than anything else, the family is ready to start a new chapter. There's talk of a book deal, and the Browns are getting used to the idea of being, in the words of their oldest son — a Minnesota National Guardsman — "the face of medicinal cannabis in Minnesota."

"It was so negative before, trying to keep my[self] out of jail," Angela Brown said. "Now it's positive, to prevent anyone from having to go through this. This is where my life is. Let's roll with it."