One Thing May Stop Her 700 Daily Seizures – Cannabis

Time briefly stops for 7-year-old Lorelei Ulrich every three minutes.

Lorelei, a little girl from Bristol Township with a big personality and contagious laugh, has suffered from intractable epilepsy all her life. She’s been on over a dozen medications, yet nothing has limited her seizures quite like vagus nerve stimulation. The stimulation to her brain, helps to reboot it every three minutes for 30 seconds, helping to reduce her 1400 seizures each day to roughly 700.

Lorelei doesn’t suffer from a rare condition, epilepsy is the fourth most common neurological problem in the world, but what makes Lorelei’s epilepsy so unique is how she got it. According to Dana, Lorelei’s mother, Lorelei shares a specific genetic mutation with only six other girls on the planet.

Dana is the spearhead behind her daughter’s campaign for better medical care. Lorelei, now a resident of Berks County, already sees some of the best doctors in the country and has tried some of the best medications, all without success. So what’s left to try? According to Lorelei’s family, it’s cannabis oil.

Visit the Legalize for Lorelei page on Facebook.

Research by a variety of studies has showed that small amounts of cannabis oil, low in THC (the ‘high’) and high in cannabidiol or CBD (the ‘healing’), mixed with coconut oil and ingested has proven successful for a variety of illnesses and diseases, including types of cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Glaucoma, and yes, even Epilepsy.

Even though the research is there, Lorelei lives in Pennsylvania, making it illegal for her to try. Currently 23 states and Washington D.C. offer medical marijuana cards, as close as New Jersey and as far away as Alaska. Yet, that means a big move for Ulrich and her family all on the assumption that cannabis oil will solve or even help with Lorelei’s condition.

“We think about moving a lot. Financially, it’s the biggest restriction, even if we sold everything we had,” Dana said. “What happens if we move to Colorado, what happens then? We have no family there, and with a condition like Lorelei’s, people underestimate how powerful that support system is.”

Lorelei, whose seizures typically last for three to 10 seconds, sometimes falls victim to grand mal seizures which can last minutes, even hours, requiring immediate and sometimes extended medical attention. At times like those, it would put an unbelievable strain on the Ulrich family, being over 1700 miles away from everyone and everything they know.

“Moving to Colorado, I’m not sure it’s something feasible we could do, and we shouldn’t have to move, why should my zip code dictate the kind of medical care that [Lorelei] can receive,” she said.

The Ulrich family hasn’t been shy about advocating for medical marijuana. In 2014, the family helped design Senate Bill 1182, and while it passed in the Senate 43-7, it became a completely different bill by the end of the 2013-2014 session. “It was completely gutted,” Dana told LevittownNow.com. Dana said the condition list, which began at 45, was shrunken to just 10.

It’s important to Dana and her supporters that the condition list remains very wide and open to determination.

“That’s how legislation works in this country,” said Lorelei’s grandfather Tom Nadzam. “It’s non-medical professionals dictating who is worthy of medical treatment. Let’s leave it to the doctors to decide.” Dana hopes that medical marijuana legality in Pennsylvania would allow doctors to see patients and recommend the plant if they see it as helpful to their condition.

While the bill being gutted and changed significantly may have been damaging for the Ulrich family and thousands who support them, it gave them a new opportunity to resubmit the bill this year in a new light and with new direction.

The bill was re-issued in 2015 as Senate Bill 3. Republican Senator Mike Folmer, whose district covers sections of Dauphin, Lebanon and York counties, is the primary sponsor behind the bill.

“As much as it was a bummer, I’m very happy it didn’t pass the first time,” she said. “The legislation didn’t pass what it was supposed to look like, we don’t want to turn into New Jersey or California, let’s just pass it right the first time.

Click here to read Senate Bill 3.

While the controversy may exist, Dana says they face very little opposition. According to her, it helps that while marijuana is listed as a narcotic much like heroin, it’s never been responsible as the cause of death in any individuals.

“When you have something so benign as cannabis, what’s the fear,” Dana said. “And if it doesn’t work, then what have we really hurt?”

Despite the common misconceptions, according to studies conducted by California NORML, marijuana is not a gateway drug.

“There is no scientific evidence for the theory that marijuana is a ‘gateway’ drug,” reads the study. “The cannabis-using cultures in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America show no propensity for other drugs. The gateway theory took hold in the sixties, when marijuana became the leading new recreational drug. There is evidence that cannabis may substitute for alcohol and other “hard” drugs, through its illegality: persons who deal in marijuana are likely to deal in other illicit drugs as well.”

According to Dana, the marijuana situation becomes more dangerous when people are forced to access the drug in dark alleys. “I don’t care what state you live in, people are going to use cannabis under the radar,” she said. “Let’s get it off the streets and out of the back alleys, that will not only help the people, but hurt the drug cartels.”

On Tuesday, Dana and her family will take another giant step forward in their fight, by joining politicians and a renowned doctor to educate others on the issue. The event, sponsored by Campaign for Compassion will take place at Bucks County Community College.

“When I first started this fight, I had no idea there were other people in PA fighting this,” Dana said. “I started this fight for my daughter and I very quickly met other people in the same boat as us, now I don’t just fight for Lorelei, we all fight for each other.”

The Campaign for Compassion will hold their educational forum on Tuesday March 24 at 6:30 p.m. at Bucks County Community College’s Zlock Performing Arts Center at 275 Swamp Road in Newtown. Dana Ulrich will be joined by State Senators Chuck McIlhinney and Mike Folmer, State Representative Tina Davis’ Chief of Staff Bryan Allen and Dr. Jahan Marcu, PhD. The event is completely free and open to the public, to find out more information, please visit here.

To find out more information about Lorelei and her family’s fight to legalize marijuana for medical use, visit her website here, and her Facebook page here.