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.