9-year-old girl with autism and epilepsy requests cannabis use at school

Nine-year-old Krystal Mattis can’t go to school all day because she uses cannabis tincture to treat epilepsy and autism spectrum disorder.

Sabrina and Tim Mattis, her parents, told CBS News they wanted their daughter to receive a full-time education, something she hasn’t been able to do because of her symptoms. In order to last a full day of school, Sabrina and Tim said Krystal needed a dose of her tincture at lunchtime. The tincture is a mixture of CBD and THC mixed with a little juice.

However, the school told Sabrina and Tim that if Krystal wanted to use cannabis during the day, she would have to take her medication off-site and then return to class.

“I think it’s unfair. This is unfair,” Sabrina Mattis told CBS. “She just deserves to be at school for a full day and get her medication like any other child.”

In addition to her regular doctor visits and the various therapies needed to treat her disorders, according to the CBS article, Krystal is nonverbal and uses a device to communicate. Sabrina and Tim Mattis said that taking her in and out of school would only serve to further disrupt their daughter’s schedule and cause her unnecessary confusion.

“Taking her back will just throw her out of her routine. “The chances of her not understanding the whole situation and feeling unwell are greater if she doesn’t have a good rest of the day, as opposed to us just going there, giving her the dose and leaving and there’s hardly any interruption represents,” Tim told CBS.

Krystal Mattis, courtesy WCCO

Sabrina and Tim Mattis were unable to influence the school and did not want to take what they told CBS was a breakthrough drug away from their daughter. They decided to keep Krystal in class half-time. However, their fight would continue a little higher up in Minnesota state government. Sabrina reached out to Minnesota DFL Rep. Zack Stephenson, who authored the adult-use cannabis law that recently passed in the state of Minnesota.

Rep. Stephenson told CBS that he spoke with the family and told them that Minnesota state law has an exception to adult cannabis laws for the use of medical cannabis on school grounds as long as it is not ingested by smoking or vaporizing CBS said they emailed the Krystal School District for comment but received only a brief statement saying the district “does not comment on a student’s medical interactions with our schools.” can”. The district pointed to privacy laws that nearly all American educators, doctors and social workers are generally bound by.

Rep. Stephenson also said that maintaining Minnesota’s medical cannabis program will remain his top priority while helping write and draft legislation on Minnesota’s thriving adult-use market, saying the following:

“There is a stark difference between medical cannabis and adult-use cannabis,” Rep. Stephenson told CBS.

According to the Minnesota Medical Cannabis Dashboard, Minnesota’s medical cannabis program currently has just over 18,000 participants, including 452 patients between the ages of five and 17. The vast majority of medical patients in Minnesota use cannabis to treat chronic pain (59.3%) and post-traumatic stress disorder (32.3%), but the second most commonly reported use is for severe and persistent muscle spasm disorders such as epilepsy, with 2,217 patients statewide. An additional 802 Minnesota patients use cannabis to treat autism spectrum disorder.

The Mattis fight will continue as the school district has not yet changed its decision regarding Krystal. As cannabis legislation progresses from state to state, individual cases like this will undoubtedly make headlines a little more often, and the line between patients’ rights and illegal activity will undoubtedly continue to blur as legislation at both the state and federal levels attempts to rewrite and undo decades of cannabis prohibition laws.

“We hope to bring justice to the children who use medical cannabis so that they can be allowed to take their medication in school, just like any other child in the state of Minnesota. “We hope so,” Sabrina told CBS.