Medical marijuana can treat infantile seizures -- the tragic price of federal delay of medical use of marijuana

The Washington Post produced an excellent 10 minute video on the use of specially bred strains of medical marijuana to treat infantile seizures that, untreated, lead to catastrophic developmental delays and disabilities. It features an Indiana family bankrupted by the costs of the conventional and ineffective treatments choosing to move to Colorado where legal, regulated medical marijuana is available for pediatric care.

A mother wonders, if the heavy stigma that surrounds the medical use of marijuana had been removed years ago (California passed its medical marijuana law in 1996. DEA's Chief Administrative Law Judge ruled in favor of medical marijuana in 1988!) would she have sought treatment for her boy at a much earlier age, sparing him the disability he suffers from? Her 10 year-old boy, after a decade of the "conventional," FDA-approved medications, now functions at the level of a 4 year-old, still not toilet trained nor able to recognize colors or letters.

Everyone laments that the FDA is not involved in the research and development of these treatments. That FDA involvement is not the fault of the babies, their parents, their doctors, or the medical marijuana researchers. The non-involvement of the FDA is fundamentally the fault of President Barack Obama, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Attorney General Eric Holder (whose wife is a widely respected physician).

The Obama Administration has disregarded the political advantages of endorsing a scientific embrace of medical marijuana in order to appease law enforcement bureaucracies and lobbyists from numerous law enforcement officer organizations such as the Fraternal Order of Police. I think it is plausible that the Administration has also been influenced by the politically powerful pharmaceutical industries which are likely to lose market share for numerous product lines if medical marijuana is legal at the federal level, but I have not seen evidence that documents this hypothesis.

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