The Broken Record of THC, Baby

I think ya'll are in need of a Sophalofa update,  no? Let's all knock on wood three times, on the ceiling like you mean it. We've gotten through another minuscule wean of the benzo, and Sophie is sitting up, eating and drinking and walking and humming and not-sleeping and not-seizing like a champ. The THC is helping her.

The benzo, legally prescribed and given to her over much of her twenty-two years on the planet, damaging her brain and causing Benzo Withdrawal Syndrome does not work. It harms her.

The THC and CBD are helping her.

Let me type that again: The THC is helping her. 

Did you hear that Jim Sessions, Tom Price and all the rest of you goons on the cabinet and in the legislature of the Disunited States of Amerikkka, Inc.? Canada is moving right along with federal policy. You can read about that here. If the country didn't discriminate against those with disabilities immigrating there, I'd be putting on my tiny mother mind™ thinking hat right over that pink pussy one that I'd need anyway given Canada's chilly climate.

Anyhoo.

THC, baby. CBD. Whole plant cannabis medicine.

Sigh.

Did you read this?

A pharma company that spent $500,000 trying to keep pot illegal just got DEA approval for synthetic marijuana

Don't peel yourself off the floor or anything. You've heard it all right here for years. I've walked by Insys' tables at epilepsy conventions and "brain" summits, walked by their smiling reps and picked up and perused their glossy brochures. I have probably benefitted from their underwriting of epilepsy projects. In the words of Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club (watch the whole thing, please, because his final line is what I'm saying):



















This has been a Public Service Announcement.

If you want to learn more about cannabis medicine, I highly recommend you purchase Dr. Bonni Goldstein's book Cannabis Revealed. I helped her to tell the stories of many people who are seeing amazing results for various diseases and conditions, and you can read about them as well as learn about the history of the plant, how it works, what the latest research tells us, how to dose and other invaluable information. Because of my contributions, I do make a small amount for every copy sold, so this is also my disclosure, but even if I didn't, I'd tout the book as it's the best one out there about a subject that we still, evidently, can't convince the Powers That Be to get their heads out of their fannies, look past the cold, hard cash and start helping people like Sophie with it. Send a copy to Sessions et al, if you're so inclined, to help their view. It's dark and stinks up there.

Cannabis Revealed

Medical Marijuana, Endearments and The Washington Post

At the Ballard Chittenden locks, Seattle, Washington
February, 2014

This morning, I opened an article in The Washington Post with this title: 'Mommy Lobby' Emerges as a Powerful Advocate for Children. I wouldn't be going out on a limb, here, when I state how demeaning I find this title, much less how inept. First of all, I worked for years as a parent expert with national organizations dedicated to improving the access to and quality of healthcare for children, and as both a leader and collaborator with other parents and a mother of a child with special healthcare needs, I can state with much confidence that most of us don't like to be called mom or mommy by the medical establishment, much less a newspaper. Secondly, the lobby consists of fathers, too, particularly out here in California where single fathers of children with severe epilepsy have served as pioneers for their children and their access to medical marijuana. The fact that this lobby of impassioned parents is reduced to the title mommy lobby underscores some of the most frustrating problems with our hierachical medical/pharmaceutical establishment, particularly the lobby's need to nearly BEG for something to happen.

The rest of the article is informative in parts, but not one single mention of the relative inefficacy of FDA-approved drugs for tens of thousands of children with epilepsy is mentioned. I didn't see a single mention of the combinations of drugs that our children are subjected to, either, their often vicious side effects, and the FACT that many of them have mechanisms of action largely unknown. It would seem, by the article, that mommies are standing in front of legislatures all over the country and begging for lawmakers to help them to save their childrens' lives and their families' quality of life, while other mommies are heroically dropping this scary, unknown substance into their witless children's mouths. Nowhere in the Washington Post article is any sort of acknowledgement or even deference to the grotesque inadequacies of current treatment for refractory epilepsy, the labyrinth that many parents have navigated to get "approved" treatment, the serpentine path from diagnosis to adequate care, nor the enormous expense of the almighty FDA-approved medications that our physicians have, basically, thrown at us after a selection that conjures images of a dart game in a bar.

I don't have any answers to this and feel blessedly grateful that I live here in California, was one of the first people to obtain Charlotte's Web for Sophie and that it has helped her dramatically. I will tell you that I feel increasingly enraged, if not surprised, by the response of the medical establishment and the media to this groundswell. I'm powerful, but I'm not a mommy, and because this is my blog and my platform and not a reasonable place where I have to work rationally in front of the Powers That Be, I'll tell the Washington Post this:

You can start by speaking with veteran parents of the epilepsy world about what they've experienced for decades. You can acknowledge that parents begging for treatment from their legislators is ridiculous. You can stop using phrases like mommy lobby.

Oh, and as the incomparable actor Matthew Mcconaughey's character says in Dallas Buyers' Club (who fought similar battles during the early AIDS years): Fuck alla ya'll.