Speaker 1: Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia now allow some form of medicinal
marijuana. Speaker 2: But figuring out if Ohio will join
that list anytime soon, it's easier said than done.
Music: Do you want to build a snowman? Come on, let's go and play. I never see you
anymore. Come out the door. It's like you've gone away.
My daughter, Sophia, she's 6 right now. She is the most happy-go-lucky little
girl I've ever met. She is always smiling. It says "Hi"...
Sophia. This box ... (Book)
...book is just for you to help your ...
(Body) ...body to have...
Less... less ...
Seizures... seizures.
When you look at people with seizures with epilepsy, more than about 2/3 or so can
be completely controlled with medication. She was diagnosed when she was
8 months old, so in 2008 ... We took her to Children's Hospital
to the emergency room, and at that point, she actually had a seizure in the hospital,
and it was very clear at that point. I think her mother and I recognized it immediately, and so did the doctor.
I just lost it in the parking lot, just all of the weight of it
hit me all at once, just like, oh, this is very serious. I didn't know much about it
at the time, but I knew it was bad.
And about a million people in the United States have epilepsy that's not completely controlled with medication.
The doctor came to us, the surgeon, right before the surgery happened, and just
was reminding us that, "I have to tell you that this surgery is taking out part of where
your daughter's personality could lie," parts of her personality. Something that was really
hard as a parent was not to know if my very charming and awesome daughter that everyone
falls in love with, if that was going to be the same person that came out of the surgery.
Unfortunately, for Sophia, it didn't work. They were able to get most of it out,
but not all of it, and obviously that part that was left is still capable of generating
seizures. She had seizures again after a
little over a month, she had seizures again.
We would like to try a plant that is natural. For a long time, the work on cannabis and epilepsy was inconclusive, maybe it works,
maybe it doesn't. They couldn't quite figure it out. It's only when they really started
separating TMC from CBD, that they saw definitely, yes, CBD seems to really stop seizures.
The belief is that it's the cannabidiol portion of it that seems to have less intoxicating
effects, and maybe more of these anti-seizure effects.
We've tried everything else that they can possibly come up with. We tried to
stop these seizures. None of it has worked. We should be able to try a pretty benign plant
before you take out a quarter of my daughter's brain.
I can't tell you what that means
to us. It gets you... doesn't it a little bit?
If it doesn't get you, something's
wrong with you. She lived her life in a catatonic state. Now, her parents get to meet her for
the first time. I don't even know Sophia without
seizure medication. I've never gotten know her past 8 months old without being drugged
on something, ever. She's so amazing already on a lot of medicine, but it would be really awesome to know her without those medicines.
And that's what the Epilepsy Foundation is really about. It's kind of absurd that your zip
code determines whether you can get a treatment or not get a treatment that you think might be effective.
This is the last effort for us,
and it should have been the first one. The first thing that we should have been able to do is try a plant.
Do you see a scenario under which
you would support a medical marijuana amendment? No. No. No.
That's a call for physicians, and no, I don't think that makes any... No, that's not what we need to do.
Sophia singing: The bare necessities. Forget about your worries and your strife.
I mean the bare necessities. That's why a bear can rest at ease with just the bare necessities of life.
Prickly pears. [Laughter]