Woman, 70, Busted For Selling Pot

Why would a 70-year-old great-grandmother be arrested twice in two weeks on charges of dealing marijuana?

“I made a big mistake, I guess,” Hazel Helen Gessler says. “I don’t know. It’s just craziness.”

On July 26, Jackson County detectives received a tip that Gessler was selling marijuana in Ashland. They found 11 plants in her yard and half a pound of the drug in her house. She was cited, but not jailed.

But on Monday, after hearing that she was selling again, detectives returned and seized 14 additional bags of marijuana, packaged for sale.

Gessler was taken to jail.

On Tuesday her daughter posted $500 bail, and Gessler returned to her two-bedroom house on Mistletoe Road.

The front yard is filled with roses and chrysanthemums. Inside her house is a framed “Mother of the Year Award.”

But a sticker on her phone, illustrated with female silhouettes of the sort that grace truckers’ mud flaps, reads, “Bad Girls Wanted.”

Gessler is a retired cleaning woman.