Medical Marijuana for Kansas Proposed with Tight Rules in Hopes of Winning Legalization

Kiley Klug, flanked by her 13-year-old son, Owen, in a wheelchair, stood before Kansas lawmakers Wednesday and pleaded to let her treat her son’s hundreds of daily seizures with legal medicinal marijuana.

At one point, she paused to tend to one of the boy’s seizures before resuming her testimony.

“He, as you can see, suffers from a rare, relentless seizure monster called Dravet Syndrome,” she said. “He, at his worst, has struggled through up to 200 to 300 seizures a day.”

Klug was speaking in favor of a bill that’s a new effort this year to legalize medicinal marijuana. She said her son has shown significant improvement using products containing limited THC, which falls in a gray area under Kansas law, and they want the option to try other cannabis treatments.

“We need the flexibility to explore different strains and ratios,” Klug said, “in order to find the combination that’s most effective to combat these seizures.”

Kansas lawmakers are taking another run at medical marijuana legislation this session, but it could face long odds after other plans have stalled in recent years.  [Read more at Kansas Public Radio]