parents of charlotte, if they could have gotten the marijuana earlier or learned about the marijuana earlier, they probably would have given it to her earlier as well. as brian pointed out, there s not a lot of options here. we do think about the brain development and people s brains develop certainly as children all the way up into the mid 20s and you want to be more judicious in those situations. in charlotte s case, i m not sure how it was with vivian but charlotte was on seven different combinations and they were thinking of compounding a veteran medication because they had run out of options. there aren t a lot of studies on dravet syndromes but there are studies about seizure conditions in general and cannabis. there are options but none of them really work except high cbd
this girl charlotte. the type of marijuana is a medicinal marijuana. it has low thc, country is the stuff that is a low psycho active part and high cbd. she s not smoking it. she s taking it as an oil and took her seizures from 300 a week to two or three a month. what you think of when you think of marijuana use in this country i think will change when you see something like this. but i think there s a bright line to be drawn between those two. let s talk about some of the criticism. you knew this was going to have people talking. there s a lot that we could talk about but here s some of it. the director of the national institute on drug abuse came out and said marijuana is especially harmful to brain development in adolescents. what has your research found about that? first of all, she was in our documentary. second of all, we said that in the documentary.
cancer from smoking marijuana. can you? well, you know, i think there s a concern any time you smoke anything that you can damage the lungs. certainly we see that with cigarette smoke, tobacco. it took a long time to prove that. we don t have conclusive evidence to say right now that marijuana leads to lung cancer. smoking is not what i would advise as a physician. the patients taking this let me be clear. sometimes these strains of marijuana they are taking as an oil. and it s a high cbd, low thc. what that means is they re not getting high off of it but rather using the medicine instead and using it as an oil instead of smoking it. i think of this as a medicine. when you think of reefer madness, when you watch this documentary, i think you ll see a whole different way of using medical marijuana. i think you re doing an excellent job. thanks very much.