Before my son, Austin, was even five years old, he had been prescribed a series of pharmaceuticals for his epilepsy—opioids, benzodiazepines, rufinamide and more. That continued for years. The side effects were absolutely awful. The sheer number and potency nearly killed him several times, but they never stopped his daily seizures.
By the time he was eleven, his body was shutting down from the daily pills that had hideous physical, emotional and mental repercussions. While he was on life support, the doctors told us that if the pharmaceutical damage to his organs didn’t kill him within two years, the seizures would.
“Just take him home,” the doctors said, “there’s nothing more we can do here.” It was the most terrifying, infuriating, overwhelming moment of my life. The doctors were giving up on my son because the pharmaceuticals they had been prescribing for years had done more damage than they could repair and the seizures remained, worsened.
We couldn’t just watch our son die. We refused to accept that, we had no idea what we were going to do, what we had to do, but we knew we needed to do something for Austin. Whatever it took to help him, that was our mission.
There was a lot of information on hemp, CBD, medical marijuana gaining traction in the news with doctors and scientists speaking in favor of its potential. But my husband was a fireman in our beloved hometown, and trying plant medicines could make him a felon. Our entire family would be at risk. We could lose everything, go to jail and lose Austin.
That refusal to give up, and the desperate attempt to find lawful options, led our family to uproot our lives in Oklahoma and move to Colorado—one of the only states where families could legally access hemp and cannabis as medicine in 2014.
Now after our years-long battle to give children like Austin lawful access to this medicine, to give other parents hope when there is none, Congress is poised to re-criminalize this plant and again put hundreds of thousands of patients, and the people that love them, in jeopardy.
Hellbound and Down 