Gov. John Hickenlooper signed a bill into law that will allow school personnel to administer medical marijuana to students with a medical marijuana registry card on campus.
In a statement, the governor said the bill expands on current law to “allow school personnel to administer medical marijuana in a non-smokeable form to students qualifying for medical marijuana use.”
The statement continued to outline the governor’s reasoning, saying the office spoke with parents whose children are medical marijuana patients and “find their reasoning and advocacy very compelling.”
The statement specifically pointed to Hannah Lavato and her son Quintin, who spurred the action and whose argument the governor labeled “overwhelmingly persuasive.”
Quintin suffers from three types of seizures, including grand mal. He also suffers from Tourette’s syndrome.
“The pharmaceutical medication basically made my son, for lack of a better word, extremely hard to dealt with,” Hannah Lovato said. “He would go from zero to a hundred in seconds whether he was angry, happy, sad.”
In January, Quintin was able to wean off the drugs and now uses a type of cannabis oil called Haleigh’s Hope.
“He’s sleeping better at night. He’s happy. He’s loving baseball. He’s loving school again. He made two friends he didn’t have before,” she said.
However, the cannabis oil has not completely stopped Quintin’s seizures as it has in other children. Hannah Lovato said it’s because he isn’t getting the proper dosage.
“He should be getting three doses a day. Unfortunately, both of us are working parents. Like we said, we have five children,” Lovato said.
“We can’t afford to stay home and because of that we can’t give him his third dose in the middle of the day.
“If a nurse was able to give him that third dose at school, that would open up his medication doses and help us out immensely. And it may mean the difference between where he’s almost seizure free right now and actually being seizure free if he was able to get that third dose.”
Hickenlooper’s office clarified the terms of the bill, saying “school personnel are not required to administer medical marijuana to a student patient, but rather makes the bill volitional.”
