Caroline Melly

I'm Caroline Mellie, and I use she, her pronouns.

No, my friends, most of my friends are like astonished that this has become my field of research.

When they hear this podcast, perhaps they will start doing that.

Yeah, I would say if you had told me 12 years ago that this is where my scholarly future was headed, I don't think I would have imagined that that could be the case.

I actually was trained as an urban anthropologist.

I worked in West Africa, had every intention on continuing to pursue that research with a new project based in technology when my infant son, who was five months old at the time, was diagnosed with a catastrophic form of epilepsy.

So that form of epilepsy is notoriously quite difficult to treat.

said, all right, let's go ahead and do this.

This is a question that I'm constantly trying to puzzle out.

And I think that there were a lot of entangled forces that made that even possible.

You know, some of it is a kind of movement towards anti-racism that we see bubbling over the years in the United States and a reconsideration along the terms of, you know, prison reform, for instance.

Mm-hmm.

I do think a lot of the force in the country that has come around legalization in general has really come first through medical cannabis, right?

And there are many different, perhaps unusual, solidarities that have formed in order to make that happen.

So some of it is veterans of wars, for instance, who are living with debilitating conditions that involve lots of bodily systems and where they were put on high doses of medications that caused even more trouble.

Right.

And so there is a pretty significant force of veteran folks who were part of the drive towards legalization in various states.

Certainly in California, for instance, it was AIDS patients who were a large part of the catalyst there.

And certainly across the country, I think epilepsy patients have been a huge part of this and parents of children with epilepsy and cancer as well.

It passed even through the Silk Road.