The Austin Chronic: One Year After the Raid, Adam Reposa Stays Flagrant
Celebrating a “raidiversary” with ATX Budtenders
By Kevin Curtin, Fri., Feb. 7, 2025
One year – to the day – after being raided, Adam Reposa’s traphouse is bustling and the mood’s carefree. The boisterous trial lawyer is pouring colorful THC batter into huge trays of gummy molds, a barber is giving people fades and shaves, blunts are being passed around the living room, and a videographer is filming me as I get routed in pool by someone in the ATX Budtenders entourage.
Soon, one of the dispensary’s principals – who I know by his pseudonym “Moisha Chingawitz” – recounts the action from the morning of Jan. 22, 2024: the SWAT battlewagon, the officers with assault rifles trained on the front and back doors. He points to where the flashbang grenade had exploded inside before a loudspeaker instructed the two associates present to put their hands over their eyes and walk outside.
That raid – led by the Travis County Sheriff’s Office, under the auspices of a DEA task force – resulted in the confiscation of roughly 100 pounds of cannabis, plus edibles, several firearms, and a substantial amount of cash from the unlicensed dispensary. And yet, 365 days later, no one involved has been arrested or charged with a crime.
Reposa contends that the raid on his business, and the busts of several other illegal cannabis dispensaries in Austin thereafter, have merely been performative acts for law enforcement to string up charges that Travis County prosecutors will ultimately dismiss – making the courts look soft.
As detailed in the two previous installments of this serialized saga, Reposa has spent his post-raid year on an unrelenting campaign of taunting and public mockery against the officers, judges, and politicians he’s at odds with.
“We’re going to put you out on social media and we’re gonna keep calling you hoes because, seemingly, you can’t do nothing with it. Like an old man fiddling with his dick – that’s what they look like to me,” Reposa says of the county’s law enforcement and court system. “Are they going to step up enforcement on my ass? We’re on a website. They gotta get the feds to take my websites down. APD isn’t gonna do shit. At the end of the day, you know who I still got standing there? A Travis County jury. And you know what I do? Litter... in a decriminalized city. We litter and sell T-shirts.”
That’s the latest in the ever-evolving premise of ATX Budtenders: They sell you a T-shirt... and then “litter” the weed.
I ask Reposa if his prediction on what will ultimately happen to him is different today than it was in the immediate wake of the raid. He replies that the situation is the same, but perhaps the probabilities have shifted in his favor.
“What’s my worst-case scenario? Federal prison,” he shrugs. “What’s my best-case scenario? I replace Cookies as the number one weed clothing brand in the country.”
ATX Budtenders is different from most cannabis businesses in that it seems like much of the profits are reinvested into art and propaganda. The associated clothing brand, Mr. Chinga, features 26 different designs – each one a character that is either an enemy or hero to Reposa’s cause. These illustrations, on T-shirts and posters, are visually impressive, highly insensitive, and largely politically motivated.
The most recent addition to the roster is Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick – who’s currently pushing legislation that would ban all forms of THC in Texas. Here, Patrick is depicted as Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump: long hair, red bandanna, wheelchair, tiny American flag – except he’s wearing a tank top reading “Texazi Lives Matter” and he’s fondling himself.
“We think he’s helping us by taking out the competition,” Reposa says of the Patrick-promoted THC ban, Senate Bill 3, which is expected to drive millions of dollars of business to the black market, if passed. “Undoubtedly THCA going off the shelves would help us, so it’s a huge opportunity.”
Reposa has also used my likeness without my advance knowledge or consent, though I do find it flattering. “Kickass Kevin,” which portrays me as a smooth karate guy, has been used on packages of 200-milligram gummies, a dose of edibles so strong that one gummy got me high for a whole day (I prefer ATX Budtenders flower, of which they have over two dozen strains for sale online for solid prices).
Rarely do spite and creativity intersect like they seem to in the “Chingaverse” – the business’ name for an almost incomprehensible array of plot lines, political insults, multimedia projects, and inside jokes that are used to promote its weed. There’s currently a ruse where ATX Budtenders is feuding with a Black-owned dispensary (with a name I’ve declined to print), but, in actuality, the Black men who run it are part of ATX Budtenders. In the 12 months since the raid, Reposa and crew have also released three songs about how the cops can’t stop them from selling weed. The most recent one came in the form of a music video where Reposa shaved the top of his head to play Les Grossdick, a powerful studio executive modeled after Tom Cruise’s character in Tropic Thunder. The song parodies REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on Loving You”:
I’m just gonna keep on selling weed
'Cause it’s the only thing the people need
I’m not gonna quit
I’m just gonna keep on selling shit”
Only once have I seen Adam Reposa without the in-your-face, alpha-lawyer, wild-card confidence that he explodes into every room with. One late night in October, I came over to the house for an interview and found him in a morose mood.
“Why isn’t this bigger?” he asked me, unrhetorically. “What do people think of me?”
It seemed like he was concerned that people don’t see him like he sees himself: the face of American freedom. The experience unsettled me because it had never occurred to me that Adam Reposa cared what anyone thought. For a moment, I saw his situation differently: a guy who’s been semi-estranged from his wife since the raid, living in his traphouse, needing something big to happen for it all to have meaning.
But when I returned on the “raidiversary,” Reposa’s Vince McMahon-like bravado was back in full effect – inspired, once again, to stick it to the man.
“Why do I talk to them that way?” he asks, referring to his taunting of cops, politicians, and judges. “Why does a dog lick his balls? Because he can... and because somebody fuckin’ needs to.”
I realized that all these plots, characters, and stunts that exist in his “Chingaverse” are, at the very least, a way to make things fun for him. Adam Reposa has made the most out of getting raided, and there’s something admirable about that.
