Posted on 03/11/2014 3:34:46 AM PDT by Wolfie
Medical marijuana refugees: 'This was our only hope'
They've come from as far away as Australia and Canada, or as close as Oklahoma.
They are of different backgrounds and ages, but they've all moved to Colorado for the same thing: medical marijuana to treat their sick children.
"Jordan had her first seizure at 6 months old. I had never seen a seizure before," says her mother, Paula Lyles. "We took her to the hospital. The doctors said that would probably be the only one she'd have and sent us home."
But when Jordan was 18 months old, the seizures began in earnest.
(Snip)
Doing so allowed Jordan to be treated with a strain of medical marijuana that's high in cannabidiol, or CBD, a chemical in cannabis thought to have medicinal properties, and low in tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive chemical in pot that gets users high.
Over the last eight months, more than 100 families have moved to Colorado looking for medicine to save their children's lives, according to the Realm of Caring. The organization is run by the Stanley family -- medical marijuana growers and dispensary owners who pioneered a strain of cannabis high in CBD and low in THC.
The strain is called Charlotte's Web. It's named after 7-year-old Charlotte Figi of Colorado Springs. Charlotte also has Dravet syndrome; after being on seven medications with no success, she began taking marijuana in an oil form. Her seizures were drastically reduced -- from 300 a week to two or three a month.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Utter BS.
Always is with “medical marijuana”.
It’s such a scam.
SO you think the kids are faking the seizures? Unreal.
If safety were really the test for legality, we’d not have many medications on the market.
Most researchers get government grants for research but do not work for the government. Most private research is done by the pharmaceutical companies, which only conduct research that they judge most likely to yield a profit later on. Academic and government researchers can do just about any research they want, if they can get the permits and convince other researchers that their grant proposals have scientific merit.
In the area of drug safety, the risks of the drug are weighed against the benefits in order to make a determination of whether the drug should be approved or not. Committees of scientific experts and patient representatives review the drug approval application and clinical trial results before they make recommendations to the FDA on whether it should be approved. If they do not think that the benefits of the drug outweigh its risks, they will not recommend approval.
The article said that the active ingredient in decreasing the seizures is cannabidiol, which is not the psychoactive substance, tetrahydrocannabinol, that people use to get high.
I have not reviewed the medical literature to verify that cannabidiol is not (or is minimally) psychoactive.
The dangers of marijuana are quite real. Marijuana contains carcinogens more potent than those found in tobacco. Marijuana has been shown to precipitate psychotic disorders in immature brains. Marijuana decreases initiative. Marijuana use has been connected to certain mental abnormalities in offspring, even offspring who were born years after the last use of marijuana. These are not "pie in the sky threats"--they are real dangers of marijuana use. I am not convinced that the seizure repressing activity of marijuana--if it exists, which has not been scientifically established--is better than that of current approved seizure medications. I sense here a situation where rumors claim all kinds of miraculous properties of some drug, but no tests have ever been done and there is no clear evidence of miracles. This usually happens in the realm of cancer "cures."
There are a lot of people making claims about so-called miracle cures, without evidence to back up the claims. I would not give something to my child based on hear-say.
Marijuana is a complex mixture, known to contain carcinogens and other physiologically damaging chemicals. *If* there is a true anti-seizure activity of cannibidiol, then purifying it will remove the carcinogens, psychoactive substances, brain-damaging chemicals, etc. Purifying it also allows for precise dosing, which is necessary to control the symptoms without overdosing, which can cause all kinds of toxic effects.
If you were having 2 seizures per hour, would you rather be stoned or flopping uncontrollably on the floor/bed? If powerful opiates OR marijuana were needed to control your seizures, which would you use?
If I were having seizures, I would take the drug that has been extensively tested in thousands of people for safety and efficacy, not some street drug whose main "proof" of an effect is the sheer number of old wives' tales told about it.
These drugs come with a list of possible adverse reactions & side effects.
The lists of possible adverse reactions and side effects are just about identical for all drugs. What those lists don't tell you is how many people actually have side effects--which is pretty low.
There has never been a recorded death or permanent injury from marijuana.
Marijuana contains high levels of carcinogens, more than tobacco does. It can precipitate psychotic disorder in developing brains (meaning in the brain of anyone under the age of 25). It causes users to lose their initiative, perhaps permanently. It causes brain damage in children, years after the parent last used marijuana. It is not safe.
I agree with you on the risks, but if little Johnny is having seizures all the time, certain mental abnormalities pale in comparison
I did a search for cannabidiol over at www.pubmed.org. There wasn't much. The first entry was this Cochrane review: Cannabinoids for epilepsy. Basically, it tells me that the studies to date are safety studies, which are not designed to test efficacy. Although some safety studies can give limited data on efficacy, none of the studies reviewed did that. These studies only showed that in the 48 patients studied, cannabidiol did not have short-term safety issues. That means that long-term safety has not been established. The usefulness of cannabidiol as an epilepsy treatment is still a matter of hear-say.
well exDem, I see your point. Presumably though, these folks haven’t had good success with traditional meds.
Would you have the federal government step in and put a stop to this treatment for this child?
There was an attempt to put it in a pill that was called Marinol. That had mixed success. Smoking at least had the virtue of being able to titrate. Modern spray mists could do
something similar but I don’t know if that was ever marketed.
Watch Sanjay Gupta’s medical marijuana docs “Weed” and “Weed 2”. Quite enlightening. These folks have tried everything in the traditional realm for their childrens’ seizures. Seizures that last hours and occur several times a day. The recommended drugs do not work. They turn to high-CBD/low-THC cannabis preparations as a last resort. It’s all well-documented. Other countries are pioneering this work (mainly the UK and Israel). The U.S. government isn’t interested (although they have just approved the first clinical trials of GW Pharmaceutical’s “Sativex” spray from the UK, already approved abroad).
To be clear, these kids are smoking weed. They are ingesting small amounts sublingually in oil form. Again, watch the Guptay docs. These high CBD/low THC preparations (the kind that don’t get you high) work miracles. Anybody who would get in the way of this is heartless.
Oops. to be even clearer, these kids are NOT smoking weed.
Tincture of MJ used to be in the USP. It probably ought to come back and this oil stuff too. The great fear keeping it is that some people will just use it to get high. And so they might. That’s not a problem that can be fixed with human laws if the morality isn’t there. And a morality that believes in respecting one’s body is, paradoxically, one that cares about the ill. I champion Christian faith because it isn’t made up. It’s an actual revelation of God. God would have no problem giving tincture of pot to someone who could benefit. He’d have a big problem with us saying nothing about people who don’t need it, using it to get high. Because that disses Him.
I take it that’s what you meant. I have tended to get jaded about this stuff at a secular level because what’s new under the sun? But the One who comes from above the sun, we will profit to listen to.
I fully understand the frustration and desperation that parents can feel when dealing with a child whose illness is not adequately treated by today's medicines, or whose illness requires the use of several drugs, in which case it can take months or years to determine the optimal dosages.
I also understand that people in this situation become especially receptive to the old wives' tales about such-and-such miracle cure that isn't available because (insert your favorite anti-pharmaceutical or FDA conspiracy here), and that there are many gold-diggers waiting to take advantage of people like that.
Logically, there is no reason to think that something that is untested could somehow be better than the drugs that have been extensively tested. It hasn't been tested--how can anyone possibly know it would have any effect on the condition they want treated?
Back when I had to do pharmacy inventories, Marinol was one of the drugs I would inventory. It came in round pills, sort of like vitamin E capsules, but spherical.
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