Twenty-two-year-old Haley Smith has been suffering seizures for most of her life, and her mother Lisa says medications did not help.
"She had tried 17 different pharmaceuticals, two medical diets, she had seen three neurologists,," Smith says.
Most of the time her daughter was having seizures or sleeping, but she and other parents whose kids had epilepsy heard that a component of the hemp plant – cannabidiol or CBD – was useful in preventing seizures. So they went to the General Assembly in Richmond and asked lawmakers to legalize it.
"My daughter had a seizure in the Senate Health and Education Committee," Smith recalls. "I think seeing that opened up a lot of minds that were otherwise closed to cannabis as a medical treatment."
She celebrated when lawmakers voted to legalize the product, and Smith ordered a supply from an activist mom in Colorado—Paige Figi.
Haley had far fewer seizures when she began taking CBD, and her quality of life improved. Other people reported that cannabidiol eased pain, anxiety, depression and PTSD, but it does not produce a high.
"So we were shocked on March 3rd when Paige Figi messaged me and said, ‘Do you realize there’s legislation on your governor’s desk that if signed we won’t be able to send you Haley’s oil anymore?”"
That’s because bills approved in Richmond this year would cap the amount of THC in any package of CBD at two milligrams. Smith was puzzled, because federal law already imposes a limit.
"The oil needs to be below .3% THC, which is the federal guidelines for what’s classified as hemp, and the particular strain that we use is .23 percent," she explains.
But a small bottle of the stuff contains too much THC to meet the proposed requirement in Virginia. Producers say their CBD oil is effective because it does contain other components of the hemp plant including THC. Scientists call that the entourage effect, and critics of proposed limits say further purification would mean weaker products that are more expensive.
There is a company, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, making CBD that contains no THC – a firm that employs three lobbyists in Richmond. Its drug is called Epidiolex, and Haley Smith could take it, but her mother fears changing to a new medication might bring on a seizure that, for Haley, could be deadly. Which is why she wrote to lots of lawmakers, to the governor, whom she met on the campaign trail, and to his wife.
"I said, ‘This is mom to mom. We can’t go without this medicine. There will definitely be more seizures if she gets taken off of it. It could be hospitalizations. It could be even planning a funeral,' and I enclosed a picture of her husband with Haley, and then I got a call from the governor’s office this week.”
In that call she was assured the governor’s office was working on a solution.
