Ilka deLaat, a mother of two who lives in Battery Park City, is crowd-funding a new documentary project about the ways in which cannabis oil can improve — and in some cases, save — the lives of children with catastrophic medical problems.
Her film, “Our Medicine,” profiles some unlikely advocates: a diverse group of parents (including a retired New York City police officer, a conservative Christian physician, and a Texas family) who have one thing in common: children who suffer from debilitating diseases that have shown some susceptibility to therapies that include cannabis oil.
“When I started researching the medical cannabis situation,” Ms. deLaat says, “I quickly realized that some of the loudest voices were from parents, who were saying that, ‘cannabis is keeping my child alive.'”
The timing of the project may be auspicious. In the recent national elections, nine states put ballot initiatives designed to broaden access to marijuana before voters, and eight of them passed, including three (in Arkansas, Florida, and North Dakota) that for the first time give local doctors permission to prescribe medical marijuana to their patients. (Only Arizona, where medical marijuana is already legal, declined to loosen restrictions further.) These state measures directly conflict with federal law and policy, which still characterize marijuana as a Schedule I drug, meaning it has “no currently accepted medical use” and a “high potential for abuse.”
“We decided that this subject warranted a closer look into the day-to-day lives of the families who have turned to cannabis as a last resort,” explains Ms. deLaat. “What are the laws that need to shift in order for patients to be able to access medical cannabis if they need it? And we explore why it’s still so hard for patients across America to access medical cannabis, even in legal states.” She adds that the federal government still classifies marijuana, “as more dangerous than cocaine and comparable to heroin.”
She also notes that the recent spate of victories for medical-marijuana legalization, “were hard-fought and largely won not by professional lobbyists and elected officials, but by patients and caregivers on the ground. What’s curious is that many of those patients and caregivers break the stereotype of the marijuana user.”
“All of the families in the film have children with severe seizure disorders for whom pharmaceuticals failed,” she notes. “Faced with no other option, they reluctantly turned to cannabis oil as a therapy.” In each case featured in “Our Medicine,” the children have shown improvement (sometimes dramatic) after treatment with cannabis oil, often with fewer side effects that more expensive, legal therapies.
Ms. deLaat is midway through production of “Our Medicine,” which she expects to complete and release in 2017). In the meantime, she is in the midst of a crowd-funding campaign to raise money to finance the rest of the project.
For more information, or to view the film’s trailer, please browse: www.ourmedicinefilm.com.
To contribute to the crowd-funding campaign, browse:www.igg.me/at/ourmedicinefilm.com.