Last month, Kelsey Osborne of Gooding, Idaho, had her children taken away from her after she gave her daughter a smoothie with marijuana butter in an attempt to stop her severe seizures.
A month has passed and her two children are still living with their father. Kelsey is is trying to get them back.
“I didn’t ever think it would come down to this, but it did,” Osborne told KTVB. “It tore me apart.”
Her 3-year-old daughter Madyson has a history of seizures, but they became worse than ever in October.
“They would stop and come back, stop and come back with the hallucinations and everything else,” Osborne said.
Madyson was withdrawing from a medication called Risperdal, used to treat schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder. Osborne said when she couldn’t calm Madyson down, she gave her a smoothie with a tablespoon of weed-infused butter.
“Everything stopped 30 minutes later,” Osborne said.
When Osborne took Madyson to the doctor a couple of hours later, the little girl tested positive for pot and the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare was called.
Kelsey Osborne was charged with misdemeanor injury to a child. She pleaded not guilty.
“I’ve seen it for my own eyes with people out-of-state who have used it, and it’s helped them or their children,” said Osborne
Tom Shanahan of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare said that in any case dealing with marijuana, there is one bottom line.
“Marijuana is illegal, period,” he said.
Nevertheless, Shanahan pointed out that there is a program in Boise through the FDA that uses CBD as an experimental treatment for 34 children with severe epilepsy.
Last year when Idaho governor Butch Otter vetoed a bill that would have legalized CBD for children with severe epilepsy, he set aside state money for some of those children to have access to the experimental drug Epidiolex developed by British biotech company GW Pharmaceuticals.
Unfortunately, the CBD program has strict guidelines to qualify, one being that the child has to have tried several other treatments that have failed to work.
Meanwhile Osborne says she will continue trying to get her children back.
“To me, I felt like it was my last resort,” Osborne said. “I’m not going to stop.”
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