Caroline Melly

Both the plant itself and the expertise around it passed...

from your Asia into the Middle East, India and Africa as well.

So it has a really storied history as a treatment.

And then there have been many surges of trying to kind of suffocate it too, right?

And to ban it across time and space as well.

It's really a medicine that in, especially during its prohibition for so long, was really shaped in kind of

interstitial spaces, outside legality, never through randomized controlled trials, right?

I think that what comes about is a kind of folk knowledge.

We might call them folk healers, right?

Who have shaped cannabis medicine over time.

We were eventually able to gain control using sort of typical pharmaceuticals, but the pharmaceuticals themselves have really catastrophic side effects.

I think this is one of the really important things to understand about contemporary cannabis medicine, that it really did grow in some ways out of people's desperate circumstances.

So in no way was this a movement where I think families were just sitting around thinking, we'd really like something plant-based or holistic, right?

I think it's easy to assume in this era, right, in which there are such controversies around what we put into our mouths and our bodies, that it really must be sort of like...

natural parents who are looking for a more natural remedy.

I think perhaps there's to some degree that is there too.

But I think for many of us, especially in an era in which it was still pretty difficult to introduce to your child with neurologists being on board about it, I think that...

No worries.

It's a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.

So for us, at least, I was part of many different Facebook groups at the time of other parents who had children with the same kind of epilepsy and who were similarly moving from treatment to treatment and trying to figure things out.