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The majority of Americans have zero love for Attorney General—and bonafide racist—Jeff Sessions’s war on marijuana. States that have decided to create more reality-based drug laws have begun the process of guarding themselves against Sessions and his archaic and racist crusade. Others, like 12-year-old Alexis Bortell who don’t have time to wait for cooler heads to prevail, have started a lawsuit against Jeff Sessions.
Alexis Bortell, along with her father and other plaintiffs, including former NFL player Marvin Washington, filed suit in the Southern District of New York against the attorney general as well as the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Agency. [...]
Alexis, whose family moved to Colorado from Texas to take advantage of the state’s legalization of recreational and medical marijuana, had been suffering since she was 7 from a form of epilepsy that cannot be safely controlled with FDA-approved treatments and procedures, the lawsuit says.
As a result, she often had multiple seizures a day. "Nothing she tried worked," the suit states. When her family finally tried a form of marijuana, the girl found "immediate relief from her seizures."
According to Bortell, and her legal team, she has been free of seizures for two years since beginning a medical marijuana program. Two years. If it had given her two days of relief it would be worth it.
Some science backs up Alexis’s treatment plan. Clinical trials have shown that CBD can be useful to treat seizure disorders, but we’re still learning why it works. CBD could be working along about a dozen different pathways and receptors, said Dr. Jerzy Szaflarski, the director of the epilepsy center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. (Coincidentally, that's the same state university system from which Sessions earned his law degree.) Exactly how many might be related to epilepsy isn't entirely clear. "The evidence for each and every one of those pathways is there but it's relatively weak," Szaflarski said. "It's going to take a while before we sort this out."
The evidence is stronger for CBD as an anti-seizure medication than for THC, he noted. “It doesn't mean that THC doesn't work for seizures,” said Szaflarski. “It just means that we have much less data because we've been studying this much less.”
In a couple of weeks, Jeff Sessions and his goons will be facing up against time and morality and 12-year-old Alexis.
Her day in court—February 14, at a New York City federal courthouse—is fast approaching. Alexis won't be there in person, but her lawyer, Michael Hiller, thinks the ruling will go their way.
"We are very optimistic that the case is going to come out the way it should, which is that the Controlled Substances Act is going to be found unconstitutional," Hiller said. Several other plaintiffs—a former professional football player, a veteran and another child—are also included.
And don’t let this most obvious of problems with Jeff Sessions’ hypocritical war on drugs rehash fool you: he wants to reach into every avenue and use every means necessary to take away people’s safety nets. Jeff Sessions is a bad man, in a bad position, and he wants most of us in jail because that’s where he probably deserves to be himself.