real life

A mum's desperate use of illegal drugs to keep her child alive.

If you were in this situation, what would you do?

Imagine watching your baby suffer.

Imagine being told there is nothing doctors could do.

Imagine having one option left. But it was classified as illegal.

That is what happened to Nicole Cowles from Tasmania.

Eight years ago Alice was a healthy baby. But just weeks after her birth, she started suffering several life-threatening fits each day.

News.com.au report that doctors told her mum, Nicole, that there was nothing they could do.

Pushed to her limits, Nicole turned to her last hope before she resigned to watching her baby die. Medical marijuana.

Alice has been taking cannabis oil since February, according to News.com.au, and has suffered just one seizure since. She can now walk. Go to school. And live a relatively normal life. The only problem, her medicine is illegal.

Alice suffers from a rare genetic disorder called CDKL-5, which includes epilepsy, and mum Nicole told her story to SBS Insights  last night.

Via Medical Cannabis Kids Facebook Page.

Nicole said, "When you’re faced with losing your child or trialling something that you’re told you shouldn’t trial, it’s not really a choice, you trial it."

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However, Nicole isn't even sure that what she's giving her 8-year-old daughter, is actually medical marijuana. Because, it's illegal to test it.

Regardless, Nicole says she didn't have a choice and is calling for medical trials of the drug so people like her daughter have the treatment they need.

"I don’t have an opinion on whether cannabis should be legalised for recreational use or not. But since time began it has been used for medicinal purposes, and when it comes to ill children surely it’s time for the government to provide a medical grade product. Her whole life has been filled with seizures. I recently almost lost her, for me, this was a risk I had to take. It’s my job to save my child," she told News.com.au.

Nicole has started a Facebook page Medical Cannabis Kids as part of her campaign to legalise the drug.

Experts and parents remain divided on the issue.

What's your opinion? Should medical marijana be legalised and trials begin? Or should it remain an illegal drug?

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