A family vacation can become a stressful ordeal as parents worry that their children’s medical marijuana will run the family afoul of federal law.
Meanwhile, federal classification of marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug hampers research, stifling the kind of innovation that has provide miraculous results for patients.
These were the testimonials and arguments that underscored a push Tuesday by a local medical marijuana practice seeking to convince the Obama administration to reclassify cannabis and eliminate hurdles experienced by patients.
Dr. Dustin Sulak, osteopathic physician and medical marijuana practice founder at Integr8 Health in Falmouth, said, “Research into therapeutic applications of cannabis and its constituents has been impeded, and countless patients are suffering who might benefit from this effective and versatile medicine.”
His message to the Obama administration and the message of his website, http://integr8health.com/call-to-action and its online petition: “remove cannabis from the Controlled Substance Act.”
“The erroneous scheduling has impeded medical research, created conflict between state and federal law and wasted law enforcement resources,” Sulak said.
He argued that Attorney General Eric Holder has the executive authority to reclassify marijuana without an act of Congress.
Families described their ordeals with the federal law.
“It’s one of those things when you have a shake and a nod, I guess, from Homeland Security that they’re not going to bother people who are traveling with their medication,” said Kristi Solman, whose adult daughter takes medical marijuana for epilepsy. “And yet in the same token you’re traveling with something that is listed as a Schedule 1 narcotic, so you are literally breaking the law when you cross state lines. So if we took a family trip to visit family in Arizona in the wintertime, we’d be breaking the law.”
Kristi Solman and her daughter, Katie Solman, a patient at Integr8 Health, joined the press conference Tuesday to urge public support of the online petition pushing for reclassification of cannabis.
“I was diagnosed with epilepsy when I was 11 years old, “ Katie Solman said, “and I’ve been on and off pharmaceutical medication for eight years, and starting in September I began taking medical cannabis, and it’s just completely changed my life.”
The stereotype of a pot-smoking youth with no motivation doesn’t fit, she said.
“I’m working hard in school, I’m a pre-med student, it doesn’t affect my life as a student at all,” she said.
Katie Solman explained that she is prescribed a variety of cannabis with low THC — tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive cannabinoid of the cannabis plant. She said she takes it as a liquid tincture and in a lozenge form.
Kristi Solman said that last year her daughter had problems with seizures, and at one point she had withdrawal symptoms similar to coming off barbiturates.
“It was pretty intense, and the contrast we’ve seen this year is nothing short of remarkable,” she said.
“Hopefully over time she will be able to back off those pharmaceutical medications,” she added.
Christy Shake said her 10-year-old son, Calvin, was born missing a significant amount of the white matter in his brain, “and the neurologist said he may never walk and talk, but they never said that he might have seizures, and when he was about 2 years old, he had his first seizure, it was a grand mal seizure … and that was the first of many, many trips to the emergency room.”
He was diagnosed a short time later with epilepsy.
At her website, http://www.calvinsstory.com, Shake describes herself as an “impassioned epilepsy advocate.”
Calvin has taken up to nine pharmaceuticals, sometimes as many as four at one time, in the past eight years, Shake said.
“He had at least a dozen seizures every month, that we knew of,” she recalled.
Shake described myriad challenges with traditional pharmaceutical medicines, leading to years of turmoil and torment, as the family watched Calvin battle symptoms of the medicines.
Then, Shake said, she became aware of medical marijuana.
“A year ago, I started researching cannabis, and I heard all of the great stories coming out of Colorado, and unfortunately Maine didn’t have the strain that we wanted to use, so I started looking into another type of oil that I could make myself. Calvin was his neurologist’s first patient on medical cannabis,” she said.
“Calvin has been taking a homemade cannabis oil high in THCA which is the acidic form of THC so it is not psychoactive,” Shake explained.
The dose is not therapeutic for his seizures yet, she said, “but almost immediately he started sleeping through the night, he started to be calmer, he became more focused, his balance improved, all of these were good side effects of the new medication.”
“We need to find a therapeutic level,” she noted, saying the withdrawal from benzodiazepine inflicts behavioral side effects.
Shake needed a specific form of cannabis, one high in CBD, the abbreviation for cannabidiol, the cannabinoid second only to THC when it comes to average volume.
Most plants are grown for high THC levels, so she had to search for a high CBD plant in Maine, Shake said.
“Since then some plants have been brought in anonymously, and they’re growing and they’re starting to flower,” she said, although she acknowledged that the hybrid’s import violated the law.
“We really need to de-schedule this so it’s easy for people to get. I should be able to mail order for it. If I don’t live in a state where there is a high CBD strain, I should be able to get it for my son in Colorado, I should be able to take Calvin to his doctor’s appointments in Massachusetts without fearing that I am breaking the law,” Shake said.
Beyond legal repercussions, Shake said she fears a prolonged seizure will have devastating effects on her son.
“I’m afraid every morning that I’m going to wake up and he’s not going to be alive because of a prolonged seizure,” she said.
Martin A. Lee, representing Project CBD, a medical marijuana advocacy group based in California, said that in the past month the organization has been contacted by people from 155 different countries.
“I’m going to be a little bit undiplomatic and just say that it is absolutely shameful, it is a national embarrassment, that marijuana or cannabis is a Schedule 1 substance,” he said Tuesday. “The idea that the federal government officially considers cannabis a substance that is dangerous and has no medical value is about as sensible as saying the moon is made of green cheese.”
While giving credit for recent statements by President Obama about marijuana and its properties, Lee accused the Obama administration of “grandstanding” by vowing to change the legal status if Congress complies. He agreed that rescheduling cannabis is something that Attorney General Holder could do.
“Unfortunately this is part of a longstanding tradition going back many years since cannabis was made illegal in 1937 in the United States of playing politics with people’s health and people’s lives,” Lee said.
Medical marijuana patients underscore petition to White House
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