Tara's starting to come around in this one.
She'd been seizing for about half an hour.
We had an ambulance on the way.
Who's that?
Is that you?
What was happening?
I had a seizure.
So Tara was having anywhere from 65 to 200 seizures every day.
I can remember one time it happening in the car
one of the older kids had gone, 'Tara's blue, Mum!'
And looking back and having to scoop her out of the car
and just say to the kids, 'It's okay, it's all right, Mum's just going to wake her up!'
and putting her in the back of the car, trying to not let them see
what was going on.
I first met Tara when she was three years of age.
By then, she already had the diagnosis
of catastrophic epilepsy of infancy.
Her IQ was just being thumped into nothing
by the condition, by the medication,
so it wasn't just that they were dealing with a sick child,
they were dealing with a child who was actually
becoming sicker and sicker and sicker.
And they knew, that sooner or later,
she would die of this.
In 2012 we were told, that's it, there's no more medications to try.
She's tried them all.
Her brain function is so low,
her I.Q. is now too low to score,
take her home and love her,
and pray to God that something changes, but
we were basically told to prepare a funeral.
We needed answers and we didn't have time to wait.
Prior to meeting Tara and her family,
I had never heard of or come across
the use of marijuana in childhood epilepsy.
They recognise that it's not legal for me to be involved in that
so because of the lack of efficacy of all the medication
they went searching on the net
to see what else was available.
Our biggest concern was the law.
We weren't concerned about it not working,
or what it would do to her - whether it would get her high, which it doesn't.
They weren't concerns, because she was already high on all the other medications.
She was already dying.
We couldn't make the situation any worse.
I first started using when i was a teenager.
Well, I was a commercial grower
I was doing something outside the law, I suppose you could say.
That's basically what I made my living out of, for most of my life.
I haven't sold cannabis commercially for some 7-8 years.
We weren't overly worried, because
it was done in the US.
There's hundreds of children in the U.S.
using medical cannabis.
So the very first day that Tara
took this, she went down to about ten seizures rather than 65 plus.
We thought it was just a fluke.
Thought we were imagining it,
but as the days went on, the seizures got less and less.
About ten days after she started it she stopped having seizures.
That lasted for 55 days
before she had one seizure.
That was in April 2013
and she hasn't had one since.
It was miraculous.
I was absolutely bowled over
because not only was Tara seizure free,
but suddenly the family is functioning as a family
and not just focused on Tara's epilepsy.
She's on a very small dose of marijuana in a liquid form.
I'm not aware of any side-effects - in fact, it's quite the reverse.
For the very first time
she's now potty-trained
in a way that simply wasn't poissible to do before.
She's now talking better, she's walking better.
I see nothing but positive.
There's a good chance that, well not a good chance, but there is a chance
that I could go to jail for two years.
The business itself wouldn't be affected.
It would be these children's lives that would be affected.
The business doesn't make any money.
It's just a name on the front.
It doesn't own anything,
It's just these kids and these people's lives that would be affected.
Ten to twenty thousand, or something.
One day that will come out.
It's not the money.
I'm not interested in that.
No, I want to blend back into Uluru somewhere
get a bus out there, where nobody knows me, maybe.
Mate, I'm not interested in the money.
It's no good to me. What do I want, a pair of shoes?
I don't wear them.
At the moment,
pending that court case,
Tara sitll has a supply of her medication.
As do the other 150 children all being supplied by this same company.
I would regard it as an absolute tragedy
if we had to go back to the treatments which completely failed to work for them.
If he does do jail time,
I have no doubt whatsoever
that Tara will die.
There's growing evidence in these segments, but it still remains
quite controversial in the medical literature and in the research fraternity
about the various benefits.
We really don't know what the long term consequences of these medications are,
Both from, will the drug maintain its benefit to the patient,
and is it safe in a long-term sense.
There's potential for great variation between each individual batch that's being made.
and what that means is very difficult to say
because it may have more beneficial or more negative effects each time.
I think the time has come to address issues like this,
this has only been spoken about in back alleyways, in back rooms and behind closed doors.
For cancer patients and those that are terminally ill,
from what I've heard and seen
certainly it has led me to the position where I am now
to try to decriminalise small amounts of cannabis for medicinal purposes.
We're seeing families access cannabis illegally now.
People are doing it now.
What we need to do is try to
give them some confidence and give them some peace of mind
that if this bill does pass,
then they will not be breaking the law.
I know nothing about this medication in fact,
and really do not feel able to comment upon
long term effects - all I know is that for the last 14 months
we've had a miracle.
This child has gone from disabled
and the whole family focused on her illness,
to a normal family and a normal child.
I don't believe that conventional pharmaceutical medicine has all the answers
and I'm very open to there being other solutions to problems.
We were told that it was very unlikely that she
would see her ninth birthday.
And it was probably that she wouldn't see that Christmas the following year.
But we've seen Christmas, and now we're celebrating her ninth birthday,
and she's healthier than I've ever seen her.
Okay, maybe it was a fluke.
You could say that if it was a month, if it was two months.
But we're now fourteen months seizure free.
I don't know of any child who could just fluke 14 months seizure free.
From hundreds and hundreds of seizures a day,
down to zero.