TOPEKA, Kansas — Kiley Klug, flanked by her 13-year-old son, Owen, in a wheelchair, stood before Kansas lawmakers Wednesday and pleaded to let her treat her son’s hundreds of daily seizures with legal medicinal marijuana.
At one point, she paused to tend to one of the boy’s seizures before resuming her testimony.
“He, as you can see, suffers from a rare, relentless seizure monster called Dravet Syndrome,” she said. “He, at his worst, has struggled through up to 200 to 300 seizures a day.”
Klug was speaking in favor of a bill that’s a new effort this year to legalize medicinal marijuana. She said her son has shown significant improvement using products containing limited THC, which falls in a gray area under Kansas law, and they want the option to try other cannabis treatments.
“We need the flexibility to explore different strains and ratios,” Klug said, “in order to find the combination that’s most effective to combat these seizures.”
Kansas lawmakers are taking another run at medical marijuana legislation this session, but it could face long odds after other plans have stalled in recent years.
The state has taken only the smallest steps to allow medical use of products made from cannabis, and the new bill includes significant restrictions aimed at making it palatable to lawmakers less interested in loosening marijuana laws.
Kansas remains one of only a few states without some kind of law legalizing the medical use of cannabis products. Around three dozen states have comprehensive medical marijuana laws.
Even with those restrictions, the legislation still faces opposition from law enforcement groups.
Republican Rep. Eric Smith, a sheriff’s deputy, said medicinal use would increase the number of people driving under the influence of marijuana. He said someone ignoring those kinds of impacts is sticking their “head in the sand.”
Graham County Sheriff Cole Presley, representing the Kansas Sheriffs’ Association, said the plan could put Kansas on a path to full-on recreational use of cannabis.
“Almost every state that we’ve seen go down this path, this is just one step closer to legalizing recreational marijuana,” Presley said.
Law enforcement opposing the bill also said that because marijuana remains illegal under federal law, legalizing it at the state level creates a conflict. Law enforcement officials said they’ll need an accessible database so they can verify medical marijuana ID cards are valid.
Yet the legalization for medical use is drawing some bipartisan support.
Willie Dove is a conservative Republican and former Kansas lawmaker who urged the House Federal and State Affairs committee to approve the bill. He said he’s heard from people who wanted to treat conditions such as seizures and chronic pain.
