speaker 1: twenty-three states and the districtof 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 thandone. 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'vegone away. my daughter, sophia, she's 6 rightnow. 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 helpyour ...
(body) ...body to have... less... less ... seizures... seizures. when you look at people with seizureswith 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 thinkher mother and i recognized it immediately, and so did the doctor. i just lost it in theparking lot, just all of the weight of it
hit me all at once, just like, oh, this isvery 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 completelycontrolled with medication. the doctor came to us, the surgeon,right before the surgery happened, and just was reminding us that, "i have to tell youthat this surgery is taking out part of where your daughter's personality could lie," partsof her personality. something that was really hard as a parent was not to know if my verycharming and awesome daughter that everyone falls in love with, if that was going to bethe 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 partthat 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 cannabisand epilepsy was inconclusive, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. they couldn't quite figureit 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 cannabidiolportion of it that seems to have less intoxicating effects, and maybe more of these anti-seizureeffects. 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'sbrain. 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 catatonicstate. now, her parents get to meet her for the first time. i don't even know sophia without seizure medication. i've never gotten knowher 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. thefirst 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]
