Chilean moms grow marijuana to ease their children's torment

Paulina Bobadilla was beyond desperate. The drugs no longer stopped her daughter's epileptic seizures, and the little girl had become so numb to pain she would tear off her own fingernails and leave her small fingers bleeding.

Bobadilla was driving on a mountain road with Javiera, intent on ending it all by steering their car off a cliff.

"All I wanted to do was to die along with her," the 34-year-old recalled of that day in April 2013. "I told her, 'This is it.' But then she said, 'Mommy, I love you.' I looked at her, and I knew I had to continue fighting."

Bobadilla's desperation to ease her daughter's condition is a feeling familiar to other Chilean parents who say medical marijuana can help their children and who, rather than wait for Congress to act, have taken matters into their own hands.

Despite the risk of jail, 100 parents have formed a group called Mama Cultiva - or Mama Grows - to share knowledge about cultivating marijuana to extract cannabis oil for their seizure-stricken children.

In clandestine meetings, the parents exchange tips and listen to cultivation experts explain how to grow and reproduce plants. Bobadilla and most of the members grow marijuana in their backyards, even though they could face up to 15 years in jail for doing so.

Cannabis oil

Chile allows consumption of the drug, but growing, selling or transporting it is illegal. Approval to use the drug as medicine is hard to win, and requires navigating a bureaucratic maze that most see as a waste of time. A proposal to decriminalize such use is making slow progress before lawmakers.

Growing plants is slow work, and members complain they sometimes must resort to buying from illegal dealers.

Gabriela Reyes, 23, credits the cannabis oil with saving her 7-month-old son. Lucas spent the first months of his life in a hospital, suffering up to 300 epileptic seizures a day, she said. When he no longer responded to anticonvulsion medication, doctors told her his condition was terminal.

Reyes learned about cannabis oil as an option, and began adding a couple of drops to Lucas' baby bottle. Since then, she said, the seizures have dropped to about a dozen a day, and he is now able to eat normally and recently tasted his first mashed potatoes.

In the case of Bobadilla's 7-year-old daughter, giving her a few drops of the oil each day has made their lives bearable.

Bobadilla decided to try marijuana after seeing a video about Charlotte Figi, a US girl with a rare genetic disorder that caused hundreds of seizures each week and limited her ability to walk or speak. Cannabis oil has nearly eliminated her seizures, and Charlotte, now 8 and living in Colorado, is able to walk, talk and feed herself.

Negative outcomes

Lidia Amarales, director of Chile's National Service for the Prevention and Rehabilitation of Drugs and Alcohol, has acknowledged there is scientific evidence that marijuana is useful in specific cases, such as treatment of epileptic seizures. She warned, however, that the use of any drug on children could have negative outcomes.

Before starting her daughter on cannabis oil, Bobadilla had struggled to come up with the $800 a month she needed for the girl's medicine and ended up selling her hair salon. While she can produce the cannabis oil for only $100 a month, doing so has come at a great cost: Her brother was arrested in September when, after she ran out of marijuana, he helped her buy 23 grams from a dealer. If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison.

"I'm not even scared of going to jail," Bobadilla said. "What scares me is that they'll take away the medicine."