The Cannabis Enigma

When Your Kid Needs Cannabis

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Episode notes

When Alfie Dingley's mother first broached the idea of giving her epileptic son cannabis, their neurologist threatened to call social services. So she got a new doctor, moved her family to the Netherlands, and found a treatment that worked for Alfie's seizures, caused by an extremely rare mutation of epilepsy shared by only nine other boys in the entire world. "He was in hospital every week with hundreds of seizures," Hannah Deacon explained on The Cannabis Enigma Podcast. After starting the cannabis treatment, Alfie's seizures became less and less frequent. "So we carried on and we got up to a dose of 300 milligrams of CBD and we added in a very small amount of pure THC," she said. "From when he was put back on the product after we came back to England, he had 10 months with no seizures." But Alfie's new treatment was illegal in the United Kingdom, forcing his mother to embark on a public campaign to get her son the only medication that was keeping her son out of the hospital. After appearing in the media, meeting the prime minister, and engaging in advocacy work, Hannah ultimately got her son the first-ever authorization for an individual patient to use medical cannabis in the UK.