From the Washington Post:
For the parents of children with intractable epilepsy, the stream of constant seizures, emergency-room visits and powerful medications can become a demoralizing blur. Beth Collins of Fairfax County said her teenage daughter suffered as many as 300 epileptic seizures per day.
“There were days when I just laid in bed with her and prayed,” Collins said, “and watched her because I wasn’t sure what would happen.”
Now, the seizures have all but stopped. Each day, Collins gives her daughter Jennifer a dose of medical marijuana oil from a syringe, as any parent might administer liquid medicine to a child.
But Collins can’t offer the cannabis extract from her kitchen in Fairfax, where she raised Jennifer for 14 years. Instead, she does so in a small two-bedroom apartment in Colorado Springs.…
“I feel a lot better,” Jennifer said of the treatment, which is scientifically untested. “I can focus more, I’m doing better on tests in school. My memory’s improved a lot.” Her seizures are “not completely gone,” but her mother said that “we’ve had days where I’ve seen very few, maybe one or two. That’s a major decrease.”
Another Virginia parent, Dara Lightle, says her daughter started having seizures at age 6. Nothing seemed to work. When doctors suggested removing part of her brain, Ms. Lightle put aside her earlier reservations about marijuana, and moved to Colorado. Daughter is doing much better. Instead of five seizures a day, she has had three seizures over the past 13 weeks.
Colorado and 19 other states have an medical exception to their laws banning marijuana. There is no exception in the federal law. To repeat, in the eyes of federal law, anyone who possesses marijuana is guilty of a crime. One more snippet from the Post:
Officials with the FDA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy all declined to discuss the government’s position on marijuana oil or relaxing restrictions on marijuana for research purposes.
Hmm.
More here.
