Protecting Our Children With Medical Cannabis

by Mitch Santell
Producer / Co-founder

This article hit home for me, and I wanted to share it with our Big Reggae Mix Listeners!

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Let’s talk about marijuana. Specifically, about how and why I came to be one of countless parents who have let their chronically ill children try it.

A groundbreaking study last week in the New England Journal of Medicine reported on the health benefits of cannabidiol for children with epilepsy. The study found that among children with Dravet syndrome taking cannabidiol, the decrease in the frequency of convulsive seizures was 23 percentage points greater than in seizures among children taking a placebo.

Cannabidiol is one of hundreds of chemical components found in cannabis plants. Unlike THC, the most famous, CBD is nonhallucinogenic and nonaddictive. It doesn’t make you high.

Until now, evidence of marijuana’s benefits for pediatric epilepsy has been largely anecdotal. The new CBD study is hugely significant because it uses the gold standard of a randomized controlled trial. Other limited clinical trials involving CBD have explored the drug’s therapeutic benefits for pediatric patients with conditions ranging from anxiety to movement disorders to inflammatory diseases, multiple sclerosis and cancer.

My own interest in medicinal marijuana is more than academic. When my daughter, Veronica, fell ill in late spring of 2015 — unable to breathe normally, bedridden with chronic pain and fatigue — she saw dozens of specialists. Among those doctors was a leading neurologist at one of Denver’s most well-regarded hospitals who treated intractable cases. The various drugs prescribed to my daughter weren’t working and had awful side effects.

To our surprise, the mainstream neurologist suggested Veronica try CBD. This doctor had other young patients who used CBD oil with positive results. So we did our own independent research, talked to a Colorado Springs family whose son had great success using CBD to treat his Crohn’s disease symptoms, consulted with other medical professionals and friends — and entered a whole new world.

Two physicians signed off on our daughter’s application for a medical marijuana card. She became one of more than 360 children under 18 to join Colorado’s medical marijuana registry in 2015. And we became pediatric pot parents.

Read the rest here: http://nyp.st/2rDxGGk

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