A desperate mum who smuggled life-saving cannabis medicine into Scotland for her epileptic son has followed in the footsteps of another crusading mother by getting the drug legally.
Six-year-old Cole Thomson was dying in hospital when Lisa Quarrell went to Holland for the cannabis oil.
She gave it to Cole several times a day and, within weeks, he could walk and talk again.
The Record revealed that Lisa was the first person to source the drug legally in Scotland after she found a company to courier it to Scotland.
Now Karen Gray – who also travelled to the Netherlands every few months to buy oil from the whole cannabis plant – is now “hugely relieved” to have access to the drug legally.
Karen said: “It’s amazing news. We knew we’d get pulled at Customs eventually, it was always so stressful going through the airport.”
An anonymous supplier has obtained a licence from the Home Office to import the drug legally and sell it through a pharmacy in Glasgow.
Despite her fears of being caught by Customs officials, the mum, from Edinburgh, smuggled it to the UK as it is the only treatment she has found to improve her son Murray’s debilitating seizures.
British law was changed last year to allow prescription of medical cannabis, but only containing cannabidiol not tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – the chemical that gets users ‘high’.
The British Paediatric Neurology Association says that THC may negatively affect brain development, structure and mental health.
Murray received his first course of Epidiolex, a legal drug containing CBD, in August 2018.
It appeared to work, but the positive effects subsided after three months and Murray was admitted to hospital in January unable to “eat, talk or walk.”
Karen said she thought her son “was going to die”, until a Dutch doctor prescribed a drug containing THC.
Murray began treatment on Bedrolite in March, and Bedrocan in May.
He is still responding well to treatment and is now able to play and attend school. Karen is campaigning to get Murray a prescription for the drugs on the NHS.
Even at cost price, a ten millilitre bottle of Bedrolite costs £170 and lasts just four days. The medication is costing Karen and her husband about £1,500 a month, which they are sourcing from donations.
She said: “It’s been a huge struggle. The NHS need to step in and pay for it.”
Both mothers have called on Cabinet Secretary for Health Jeanne Freeman to authorise “compassionate funding” for the drug from NHS Scotland. They were both part of the group which successfully petitioned Downing Street last year to legalise medical cannabis, after gathering over 230,000 signatures.
