“To these people, marijuana isn’t about getting high, it’s about getting well,” Harry Smith narrates in NBC’s “Dateline” episode about medical marijuana, airing on June 7.
“Growing Hope” chronicles the lives of children with intractable epilepsy, following three families from Virginia to Colorado. Their mission is to legalize CBD and THC-A oils, compounds that come from the marijuana and hemp plants. The non-psychoactive strain of medicinal marijuana has shown promise in reducing chronic seizures.
The widely covered Charlotte Figi case and “Charlotte’s Web” gets another look here, filtered through the Virginia push — not for legalization but for permission to use the drug.
Smith returns to his Colorado home turf for this heart-wrenching documentary. “The state has become something of a new Lourdes,” he says. No Bob Marley posters, Smith says inside a cannabis oil lab, “just plants and science.”
Smith asks the Stanley brothers about whether their Evangelical Christian beliefs conflicted with their pursuit of the cannabis oil for kids having seizures. Not at all, they answer. Lots of evangelical families have produced rebels, they say.
Smith interviews scientists and patients, including a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder who attempted suicide multiple times and calls himself a “marijuana refugee”; he moved his family to Colorado and credits cannabis with saving his life.
Consider this latest update on the lobbying efforts for medical marijuana part of an ongoing, visually stunning story.
