A Scots mum claims the Scottish Government has ignored her pleas to make lifesaving cannabis oil available on the NHS for her son.
Lisa Quarrell's eight-year-old son Cole Thomson has drug-resistant focal epilepsy - a condition which means he suffers from severe seizures which cannot be stopped or controlled by conventional medication.
Since he began taking the oil - knowns as Bedrolite - Cole, of East Kilbride, has gone from suffering 10 seizures a night to being completely seizure free for almost two years.
Mum Lisa, 39, hit the headlines back in 2019 when she smuggled the oil in from Holland after Cole, then six, was left unable to walk, talk or eat after a violent seizure.
Medics told a distraught Lisa that, as conventional medicines used for treating epileptic seizure were no longer effective, there was nothing they could do and his organs began to shut down.
As her son lay in his hospital bed fighting for his life, former police officer Lisa broke the law by travelling to the Netherlands and back to Scotland armed with the oil and says within weeks her son was riding his bike and chatting with friends.
However Lisa has been unable to get a prescription for the drug instead she has to find £1,200 every month to pay for the meds after finding a pharmaceutical company who have a licence to sell it privately.
Speaking to the Record, she said: "We need this to be available on the NHS. It is available in England and Northern Ireland, but not in Scotland so we have to pay £1,000 every month just to keep our son alive. How is that right?"
Lisa says she has appealed to Nicola Sturgeon directly for help with Cole's plight with the SNP leader even saying in a televised parliamentary session in 2019 that she would do what she could to help the schoolboy.
However since then Lisa says she and her family have sent numerous emails to the Scottish Government and, despite the medication being available on the NHS in other parts of the UK, they say they can't help.
She said: "I have sent repeated emails and each time I get nothing back. Nicola Sturgeon even said on TV that she would do what she could to help us and yet I have never once had any kind of correspondence from her.
"How can this be available to children like Cole in England, but in Scotland I have to find £1,000 every month just to keep my child alive?
"People tell me it's down to the UK Government but it's not. The NHS is devolved in Scotland so why am I being ignored by my government?"
After Cole was diagnosed with the condition at three-months-old, he underwent brain surgery at age two but the seizures kept happening.
Lisa spent years researching and found that cannabis oil was recommended. The mum found that the medical cannabis oil contains less than one per cent THC, the psychoactive compound that gives a feeling of being “high”.
Lisa says doctors have told her that Cole could undergo another brain surgery to potentially help stop the seizures, but it will leave him paralysed and partially blind
She added: "They said another brain surgery could help with the seizures, but he would be left unable to walk and his sight would be affected. How is that a solution when I have a solution already that has been working for two years?
"Why would invasive surgery that will leave him disabled be preferable to something that will offer him a normal life?"
The Record contacted the Scottish Government for a response, however, because the country is in a pre-election period, they were unable to provide one.
They did advise however that under the current rules, only specialist clinicians on the GMC specialist register can prescribe cannabis-based products where there is clear published evidence of benefit.
Should such a prescription be made by a specialist clinician on the register it would be dispensed through the NHS.
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