Oklahoma family leaves everything behind to seek medical marijuana

When an Oklahoma family decided they needed to seriously try medical marijuana, they knew there would be sacrifices.

They gave up their home, their friends, their church, and their jobs, and moved from their beloved Oklahoma to a nearby state where their son could receive the treatment he needed.

They moved to Colorado.

That was in July, and already, Heather White tells KRMG, they've seen a marked improvement in their 14-year-old who suffers from ulcerative colitis.

Listen to full interview HERE.

White, who hold a Licensed Practical Nurse degree, says there's no doubt at all in her mind that cannabis oil was what he needed.

The side effects from the medication he was taking were terrible, she says.

He developed a rash all over his body that was painful, and led to scarring.

Doctors told them the next step was akin to chemotherapy.

"They just basically wanted to knock down his immune system, because it's an auto-immune disease," White said.

But a compromised immune system and potentially even worse side effects didn't sound promising.

So they moved (the family has a GoFundMe page to help them defray some of the costs of the move and the medicine).

"As bad and as horrible as it was to leave everybody you love, we had to do what's best for him and try the cannabis oil. So we just sold everything we had, and picked up and moved to Colorado," she told KRMG.

So far, the oil appears to be working.

"When he started the oil, he was in an active flare, which means he was having blood every time he went to the bathroom," White said. "Within four days of using the oil, his blood stopped."

Since then, instead of serious flares and bleed on an almost daily basis, he's had only occasional problems, perhaps four days over a stretch of more than two months.

His pain has gone away, she said, his energy has been restored.

"We feel like it's definitely healing him, because you can't fake blood. That's not anecdotal. Blood is something that only shows up if there's an actual ulceration flaring."

White got emotional when she talked about her son feeling guilty that they had uprooted their entire lives.

"He wants to go home so bad...and we can't even go visit in Oklahoma. If he got sick and a hospital saw that he had THC in his system, he could be taken from us," White said.

They've told him it was their decision, not his, but he's still having a hard time because he misses his friends and family.

"He's 14. He's old enough to understand how this works, and it's just so sad to see him in tears."

White says she's extremely unhappy that despite the first successful volunteer ballot initiative in the history of Oklahoma, it's highly unlikely medical marijuana will be on the ballot in the state this November.

Attorney General Scott Pruitt changed the ballot title, which is within his purview.

But, White says, that doesn't make it right.

"Attorney General Pruitt has changed the wording. He took out 'medical' in the first sentence...which makes the uninformed voter who might just skim the first few sentences think that that is actually a recreational marijuana question, whereas it's not. It's totally medical. I don't know why he chose to take that out. For me it's doesn't make any sense when that's like the main point of this whole state question, was that it was for medical marijuana. Not just marijuana, and not recreational. It was totally medical marijuana."

She's not alone.

"I don't know if you're going to do a story on this, but there are so many families here from Oklahoma. Like, it is so weird."

And many of them, she says, moved there for the same reason they did.

"Why would a family pick up and move across the United States, to a different state, where they know nobody, they have no money - the cost of living is horrible here. Why would they do that unless A - they really believed it really was going to work. And B - they would stay there why? Because it's actually working."