I know that today’s featured pic (above) is over-stating my point but so what. Call it poetic license.
Being on the road and once again struggling with the Wifi in this hotel precludes a musical number from being incorporated into today’s Juice. Tomorrow. Perhaps.
This stuff is all over the news these days and with November referenda on legalization for recreational use fast approaching in twenty-something states South of the border, it is likely to continue to make news.
We’ll get into something diff tomorrow; today, however, we push on with our investigation of weed use for medicinal purposes like counteracting seizures in very young children, some as young as two years old.
Epileptic fits counteracted with medicinal weed oil … Vancouver Sun … 08/15/2014
Courtney Williams gives her daughter Kyla a tiny drop of cannabis oil mixed with yogurt at in Summerland, B.C., in early August, 2014. Kyla who has a severe seizure disorder has shown dramatic improvement thanks to the illegal oil. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Penticton Herald – Susan McIver
The two-year-old Summer-land girl whose family is feeding her illegal cannabis oil has had a dramatic improvement in her seizure disorder.
Kyla Williams’ family says in the past five months the oil given to the girl has greatly reduced the hundreds of seizures she was suffering from daily.
“We were astonished and so thankful when Kyla no longer had any seizures or only a very few each day. Her overall condition continues to improve both physically and mentally. Kyla is alert, increasingly socially interactive and loves sucking her thumb,” Kyla’s mother, Courtney Williams said.
The girl’s grandmother, Elaine Nuessler, said numerous drugs were tried to stop the seizures. Doctors told the family that they were down to the last possible medication and Kyla may seizure for the rest of her short life.
“The seizures themselves and the medications prescribed by the doctors were causing a progressive deterioration,” Nuessler said. Kyla had lost motor skills, couldn’t suck her thumb and was becoming less responsive to the world around her.
They began using the illegal oil when a family member saw a feature on television about how cannabis helped children with epilepsy.
Now the family is urging the government to legalize such derivatives so more research can be done on the medical and health benefits.
Under the marijuana for medical purposes regulations, which came into effect April 1, licensed producers can only sell dried marijuana. It’s illegal to sell derivative products such as oils or foods made from marijuana.**
JERRY’S NOTE
**[B.C. Federal Court of Appeal, that province’s highest court has just ruled this law to be unconstitutional. This means that these derivative cannabis products are now legal both to produce and ingest for medical purposes only. The court gave Ottawa one year to revise the law to reflect the court’s ruling.
See yesterday’s ( Saturday One-off for complete information) … Jerry]
The family has run into problems because of the lack of information on characteristics of the many strains of marijuana and the limited quantities available, Nuessler said.
“When the supply of the first oil was exhausted, we tried oil from four other strains,” Nuessler said.
While reducing seizure numbers and severity, those oils were not as effective as the first oil, she said.
Kyla’s grandfather, Chris Nuessler is a retired RCMP officer, who said he had to do a “180 on marijuana after seeing the benefits.”
“It’s critical that people educate themselves about medical marijuana and join in the struggle to have derivatives legalized,” he said.
“Careful studies are needed to determine the exact composition and concentration of each compound in the various strains and their effectiveness in treatment,” Chris said.
The studies can’t be done, as long as the oils and other derivatives are illegal, he said.
The girl’s family had been considering moving to Colorado where the oils are legal and are being used by hundreds of patients.
“Our support system is here and we’d like to help change Canadian laws around the legality of derivatives,” Chris Nuessler said.
Since the family went public with the girl’s trouble this spring, her story has appeared in major Canadian newspapers, in publications as far away as Australia and in medical journals.
Elaine Nuessler said she’s been astonished at the number of phone calls she continues to receive almost daily from parents of children with seizure disorders.
“The calls are coming from across the country. We had no idea the problem was so big,” she said.
(c) THE VANCOUVER SUN
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Now for a Jerry comment:
This case is similar to that of 6-year old Liam McKnight which I covered in a relatively recent JuicyLesson. [270]
I have never come out in favour of the legalization of weed and hashish for recreational reasons. It’s not that I am not in favour of legalization for recreational reasons but rather I have never unequivocally stated that the use of pot for recreational purposes should be legalized unconditionally.
No, I have never said that, yet I am an admitted pot user for medical reasons. Anyone who knows me and/or has been reading some of my JuicyLessons also is acquainted with the fact that I have a terribly debilitating rheumatological disease known as Scleroderma. I had never heard of it either until I got it.
My symptoms are severe pain deformity of my hands,
as well as thick skin in a three-inch bracelet above each ankle and on my arms between my wrists and halfway up to the elbows.
This auto-immune disease, named from the Greek for “thick skin”, also can attack my internal organs as well as my epidermis. I have to undergo regular testing of my heart and lungs as well as numerous other examinations and procedures such as bone density and other look-sees – both regular and irregular as far as scheduling goes.
Back to my pot use. As I said, pain is one symptom of Scleroderma and medicinal pot is curative in the sense that the basic effects of its use allows me to adequately deal with the the extreme hand pain which would be the alternative for me if I didn’t have access to the drugs I take – oxycodone, fentanyl, and med-pot.
Even with the aforementioned plethora of pain-killers I must use to defer my suffering on a daily basis, I still begin to feel some pain when the five hour limit for the oxycodone is about to be or has in fact been breached. In other words, my increased levels of pain tell me that five hours have passed and that it’s time for another pill which I then dutifully take.
Initially, I mean for the first week or so in the immediate aftermath of my diagnosis, I lived without pain killers of any kind and believe me, it was pure hell. Dr. Kang, my rheumatologist – we get along; he cares – believes in “clean living” and in line with this tenet of his, he does not prescribe painkillers as a matter of course unless the patient knows enough to request them which I didn’t at first, and like I have just said it was pure hell, unbelievable douleur.
Don’t know where I’d be without my pain killers and that includes, whether you like it or not, medical marijuana.
Tomorrow we’re headed back to warfare, specifically its state in contemporary international relations.
Entretemps, peace and love.
Over and out.
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