Jacob Redmond
Well-Known Member
Matt Phillips said that when his daughter Lillie Reese was born two and a half years ago, everything seemed fine.
"She was a perfectly normal, perfectly healthy baby ... until she was four months old. She stopped smiling," he said. "She stopped laughing. She stopped rolling over. She just stopped developing."
Doctors performed numerous tests and found she was suffering from a type of epilepsy called infantile spasms.
"Basically, her brain was being scrambled, and she was having seizures. Twenty-four hours a day," Phillips said.
"Her brain is structurally normal. Usually, when children have infantile spasms they find brain malformations or lesions or some sort of brain injury," Phillips said. "But they don't know why she is having them."
Since then, the Phillips family has gone through treatment after treatment seeking just to control those seizures.
"We've gone through pretty much every medicine, and the spasms continue to come back," he said. "We've put her on a ketogenic diet, a very strict diet that can help control the seizures, and that helped for a while. But lately they've started coming back. If we can't tweak her diet or if increasing her medicine doesn't work the only thing that we have left is the hope that cannabis oil might work."
Many doctors have reported dramatic results from using cannabis oil to treat seizure disorders.
But cannabis oil, like most derivatives of the marijuana plant, remains illegal in most of the United States. That has led to what many parents of children with seizure disorders call "refugee families." These aren't families who are escaping from religious or political persecution or fleeing war-torn nations. These are families moving to states such as Colorado, where state laws permit them to receive the treatment they say helps their children.
After meeting with one such refugee family from Georgia, state Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon, last year introduced a bill to allow the state's medical colleges to dispense a type of cannabis oil low in THC, the compound that gets people high, to people suffering from seizures and some other disorders.
The bill passed the state House of Representatives overwhelmingly but the Senate passed it only after attaching a bill that would require insurance companies to cover autism treatment for children under 6. The House refused to consider the amended bill and it died.
Chatsworth resident Sarah Callaway, whose daughter Greylynn suffers from seizures, says she was "beyond disappointed."
"There were a lot of families really counting on that. We had so much hope after the House passed it the way they did," she said.
The House approved the bill again two weeks ago, sending it to the Senate on a 158-2 vote.
Will it fare any better this time?
"The problem last year was not so much with the bill itself, though I guess some senators may have had some problems with the bill," said state Rep. Tom Dickson, R-Cohutta. "The real problem is that it got caught up in politics. There was a Senate bill dealing with insurance coverage for autism that was being held up in the House. And the situation was basically, 'We aren't going to move your bill if you don't move ours.'"
Dickson voted for the Peake bill both this year and last year.
Complicating the situation this year is a competing bill by state Sen. Lindsey Tippins, R-Marietta, which would create a four-year medical marijuana trial at Georgia Regents University for people 18 and under who suffer from "medication resistant" seizures.
Peake has criticized the Tippins bill as too narrow and something that only ratifies an executive order made by Gov. Nathan Deal last year.
News Moderator: Jacob Redmond 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Families keep close eye on medical marijuana debate - The Daily Citizen: News
Author: Charles Oliver
Contact: charlesoliver@daltoncitizen.com
Photo Credit: Matt Hamilton
Website: The Daily Citizen
"She was a perfectly normal, perfectly healthy baby ... until she was four months old. She stopped smiling," he said. "She stopped laughing. She stopped rolling over. She just stopped developing."
Doctors performed numerous tests and found she was suffering from a type of epilepsy called infantile spasms.
"Basically, her brain was being scrambled, and she was having seizures. Twenty-four hours a day," Phillips said.
"Her brain is structurally normal. Usually, when children have infantile spasms they find brain malformations or lesions or some sort of brain injury," Phillips said. "But they don't know why she is having them."
Since then, the Phillips family has gone through treatment after treatment seeking just to control those seizures.
"We've gone through pretty much every medicine, and the spasms continue to come back," he said. "We've put her on a ketogenic diet, a very strict diet that can help control the seizures, and that helped for a while. But lately they've started coming back. If we can't tweak her diet or if increasing her medicine doesn't work the only thing that we have left is the hope that cannabis oil might work."
Many doctors have reported dramatic results from using cannabis oil to treat seizure disorders.
But cannabis oil, like most derivatives of the marijuana plant, remains illegal in most of the United States. That has led to what many parents of children with seizure disorders call "refugee families." These aren't families who are escaping from religious or political persecution or fleeing war-torn nations. These are families moving to states such as Colorado, where state laws permit them to receive the treatment they say helps their children.
After meeting with one such refugee family from Georgia, state Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon, last year introduced a bill to allow the state's medical colleges to dispense a type of cannabis oil low in THC, the compound that gets people high, to people suffering from seizures and some other disorders.
The bill passed the state House of Representatives overwhelmingly but the Senate passed it only after attaching a bill that would require insurance companies to cover autism treatment for children under 6. The House refused to consider the amended bill and it died.
Chatsworth resident Sarah Callaway, whose daughter Greylynn suffers from seizures, says she was "beyond disappointed."
"There were a lot of families really counting on that. We had so much hope after the House passed it the way they did," she said.
The House approved the bill again two weeks ago, sending it to the Senate on a 158-2 vote.
Will it fare any better this time?
"The problem last year was not so much with the bill itself, though I guess some senators may have had some problems with the bill," said state Rep. Tom Dickson, R-Cohutta. "The real problem is that it got caught up in politics. There was a Senate bill dealing with insurance coverage for autism that was being held up in the House. And the situation was basically, 'We aren't going to move your bill if you don't move ours.'"
Dickson voted for the Peake bill both this year and last year.
Complicating the situation this year is a competing bill by state Sen. Lindsey Tippins, R-Marietta, which would create a four-year medical marijuana trial at Georgia Regents University for people 18 and under who suffer from "medication resistant" seizures.
Peake has criticized the Tippins bill as too narrow and something that only ratifies an executive order made by Gov. Nathan Deal last year.
News Moderator: Jacob Redmond 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Families keep close eye on medical marijuana debate - The Daily Citizen: News
Author: Charles Oliver
Contact: charlesoliver@daltoncitizen.com
Photo Credit: Matt Hamilton
Website: The Daily Citizen
