Using medical marijuana to treat childhood epilepsy has been controversial to say the least but looking into the face of those children, once debilitated and now thriving, is really hard and heartless to refute. For toddlers that suffer 100’s of grand mal seizures weekly, the toll on their small bodies and crucial developmental skills is heartbreaking even with available complex pharmaceutical combinations. What parent wouldn’t be desperate to find a cure for their little one?
Finally, there seems to be some relief in the form of a new cannabis strain which is low in the high-inducing THC but rich in cannabidiol, CBD, the compound that calms or almost eliminates the seizures. Of course, no one wants to see a 6 year old smoking a joint in the morning, so this particular cannabis is in the form of hemp oil that can be added by dosage to food or under the tongue. This strain of marijuana was specially developed by Colorado Stanley Brothers’ Realm of Caring organization who jumped to the challenge to help those children and their families with no where else to turn.
But just finding a way to ease the seizures is still not enough. They, and in turn their patients/customers, are stuck in a quagmire of legal restrictions keeping them from producing quantities large enough to supply the demand of all those that could be helped. Resourcefully as they are, the brothers are looking to circumnavigate federal laws in the most creative of ways.
“The plan would seem to defy a federal prohibition on the sale of marijuana products across state lines. But the Stanleys have justified it with a simple semantic swap: They now call their crop industrial hemp, based on its low levels of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in pot.”
