In Marble Falls, Texas, a town of 7,000 about an hour west of Austin, a drug deal of sorts is going down. Underneath cover of a gray, foggy day, local buyers—average age: 80-plus—prepare their home for the meeting. Laid out on dining table for guests is coffee, tea, and Girl Scout Cookies while FOX News blares in the background. Republican regalia, like a 2016 Trump-Pence sticker on the laundry door and a picture of one resident’s father arm-in-arm with President Dwight Eisenhower, adorn the walls. Show horses ninny in the fields outside.

With his partner and wife Vicki, Chad supplies medical marijuana to about 200 patients around Austin through their homemade tinctures, edibles, bath salts, and more. “We’re no medical experts,” Vicki and Chad admit, they just happen to have more information about cannabis than most anyone else their patients meet. Medical marijuana patients themselves, they’ve also assumed roles as political advocates, petitioning state legislators to expand Texas’s severely restrictive cannabis regime.

But first, in Texas fashion, pleasantries must be exchanged. Pat’s husband, Bill, remarks the last time he saw this curious new buyer, they were both at “the damn cancer place” receiving life-saving treatments. “So it’s good to see you here!” he says, and the room fills with nervous laughter.

Inside, local ringleader Patricia is introducing a friend to Chad Moore, her Austin plug. Pat has arranged a dozen or so similar meetings with other friends and so everyone present, except the newcomer, understands how these deals proceed. Chad will sit and listen to whatever pains and ails Patricia’s friends before suggesting some illegal goods to help alleviate all that. No pamphlet or doctor around can match the type of resource Chad provides, though this prototypically Texan household is the only location locals can find him. (I have changed Chad’s and his wife’s names at their request because they are admitting to criminal acts.)

“You have to experiment on yourself,” one cancer patient who preferred anonymity confided. Before meeting Vicki and Chad, a revulsion to smoking led this patient to sprinkle raw cannabis flower in her yogurt, guacamole, and salads, hoping some cannabinoids were entering her system. Now she takes a daily dose of 1:1 THC-CBD cannabis oil every morning, a more optimal treatment, according to Chad, because the ratio limits marijuana’s psychoactive effects and edible candies include sugar, which can drive the growth of cancer cells. (Sugar does not actually cause cancer cells to grow any faster, but that is a common myth, according to the Mayo Clinic .)

Even Chad, a rah-rah medical marijuana believer, admits there’s just “not a lot of hard clinical research about [cannabis]. So I have books that look at some of the clinical research and cite some of the studies and then I just talk about the likelihood that it might help with this.” Thanks in part to draconian restrictions on cannabis research in the US, there are a lot of open questions about medical marijuana, though there’s some evidence THC and CBD could help treat everything from chronic pain to anxiety to epilepsy in children . In the absence of authoritative information from doctors, patients end up latching on to whatever advice they happen across.

Acquiring cannabis flower in Austin isn’t difficult by any means, but the Moores aren’t just dealers, they also offer guidance to people who might be unfamiliar with the drug. For example, those who refuse to smoke marijuana but seek quick relief need to use products like under-the-tongue sprays and oil tinctures or transdermal patches (which resemble a nicotine patch) as those “get in there in about 15 to 20 minutes,” Chad says. They may not be thinking about THC-CBD ratios, or know that a 1:1 ratio was found in a 2004 study to reduces muscle spasticity and pain in multiple sclerosis patients with “no significant adverse effects on cognition or mood.”

Patricia told me that one Austin Cancer Center doctor privately admitted to her that “60 percent of her cancer patients” use medical cannabis. “When you tell her [you’re using it,] she says, ‘Good.’ But she won’t tell you to do it. She can’t.” If those patients were caught with low-level marijuana possession, they could face prison time, fines up to $2,000, and driver’s license revocation. When asked if Texans had to choose between breaking the law or getting treatment, Patricia responded affirmatively: “Yep, that’s the truth.” If not for the illegality involved, “all my friends would do it,” she says.

Without any formal system or regulations, Chad and Vicki represent an oasis for patients in a wasteland of desperation, misinformation, and suffering. Glamour or money isn’t what the couple seeks—“This is all small-time bullshit,” Chad confesses—and they’d prefer running this underground marijuana dispensary of theirs on the books. Encouraged by the Compassionate Use Act, legislation the couple never thought would happen, they started participating in political advocacy to decriminalize and expand medical marijuana during the 2017 legislative session, though those efforts fell short. This year, they’re all in. If cannabis laws don’t change, Chad and Vicki vow that they’ll relocate elsewhere.

In December, the San Antonio Express-News reported that fewer than 600 out of a possible 150,000 epilepsy patients in the state have received the medicine. Part of the issue is the bill’s wording, which specifies that doctors must “prescribe” marijuana, instead of “recommending” it, as doctors do in other states. “It's not technically a prescription because you can't prescribe a Schedule I drug,” says Heather Fazio, the director of Texas for Responsible Marijuana Policy. “So it puts doctors in jeopardy in order to participate.” Only around 45 doctors, mostly found in big cities like Dallas or Houston, have registered to prescribe the medicine.

In 2015, Texas passed the Compassionate Use Act, which allows low-THC cannabis oil to be used for patients with intractable epilepsy. But it’s the strictest so-called medical marijuana program in the country and is by many accounts a failure.

In 2011, while serving as the president of a statewide insurance company, Vicki was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Vicki smoked cannabis to relieve nauseous side effects of chemotherapy, but she wouldn’t tell her children from her previous marriage or coworkers about it. The potential consequences weren’t worth it.

She can’t help but sympathize because she is a patient too. So is Chad. At age 23 he suffered his first attack of multiple sclerosis, a disease in which the body’s immune system fights the brain and spinal cord. It can result in muscle spasms, mood swings, and temporary paralysis. His condition is relapsing-remitting, coming and going throughout his life, but each breakdown leaves his body weaker than it was before. Chad, who also overcame a battle with alcoholism and has been sober since 2005, needs drops of his homemade tincture to get out of bed in the mornings without debilitating pain.

Hidden inside the couple’s house is a small room best described as a long list of felonies—chocolates, tinctures, bath salts, transdermal patches, suppositories ( a new doctor-approved trend ), tea blends, and joints. If it weren’t for the patients, Vicki wouldn’t keep any of it lying around.

“The most important thing is that people get access to it,” Vicki admits. “I wouldn't care if all of this went away, if everybody could get what they needed.”

From then forth, Chad says “it took a space in my consciousness.” In the same year he had his first hit, Chad joined NORML, the National Organization for the Reformation of Marijuana Laws. As a teenager, he devoured the stack of literature the organization sent, suddenly inspired to be a cannabis crusader, though at the time he doubted claims cannabis was some medical “miracle plant.” He doesn’t question the idea anymore.

But Chad grew up around cannabis his whole life. When he was five, his mom told him she smoked cannabis and not to tell his teachers at school, or else mommy could get in trouble. At age 13, his mom passed him a joint because she had “some killer shit” she wanted to share, breaking their initial agreement of Chad not smoking marijuana until he was closer to 18.

That attitude represents part of their marriage’s “essential conflict,” Chad says. Vicki admits she doesn’t “like running an underground business.” Since she was a kid, Vicki’s been someone who doesn’t give anyone a reason to reprimand her. “I have always made it my style to follow the rules,” she says.

But the deal fell through at the last minute, so the couple returned to Austin, where Chad began experimenting with making cannabis topicals to alleviate his MS. It worked and soon he made caramels and chocolate bars and infused oils. They began hosting “elevation parties,” which resembled Tupperware parties: They’d come to someone’s home, display their goods, sell products, and offer a crash course in cannabis. Demand took off, so they conceived of pop-up shops at local venues, eventually hiring security and cashiers while they entertained guests.

Chad and Vicki say they stumbled into all this, as much as someone can stumble into running an illegal marijuana dispensary deep in the heart of Texas. When Vicki’s lymphoma went into clinical remission, she left her insurance job and the couple traveled around the world. A stop in Colorado, where cannabis had recently become recreationally legal, inspired the couple to try and open a bud-and-breakfast in the state. They’d raised funds, picked out bedsheets, and prepared business strategies.

“I almost feel like I have patients, but I'm not a doctor,” Chad says. “I’m giving somebody else some medical advice and trying to help them. And I feel very responsible for whether they're helped or not.”

It was a fun side hustle, something to do while they decided their next steps in life. But then people asked Chad and Vicki if they had anything to help with back pain or their mom’s colon cancer. They dug into research and established cannabis literature, offering the best advice they could. Word spread even faster than it did before. More and more those who couldn’t find solutions within Western medicine requested their services. Millennials with anxiety, veterans with PTSD, chronic pain-suffering elderly, a former Division I football coach with dementia. They weren’t always successful and their products weren’t cure-alls, but Chad and Vicki provided relief to those who previously had none.

If Chad is the hippie tinkerer of the pair, Vicki is the brainy businesswoman behind the operation. Whenever she walks through the Capitol during cannabis activist rallies, she carries a binder of dossiers on every state legislator, full of their personal information and voting records. She knows exactly where they stand on the issues and what talking points might hit a soft spot for a particular lawmaker. If Fox News plays on the office TV upon entering, she knows her work is cut out for her. Like any political advocate, Vicki doesn’t bat a thousand—like the time an aide refused to acknowledge her or even stop watching an episode of The Office on his iPhone—but she’s always prepared. To have a chance at expanding medical marijuana in Texas, she has to be.