Katelyn Baker
Well-Known Member
The answer to Rita Wooton's prayers grows in greenhouses and fields across the commonwealth.
As it grows, it looks and smells just like marijuana, but the industrial hemp from which cannabidiol, also known as CBD, is extracted won't get Wooton's 6-year-old son Eli high. What has happened since Wooton began giving her son the CBD oil dissolvable mouth strips in July 2015 is nothing short of remarkable and has outpaced any expectation doctors had for Eli, who suffers from a rare form of epilepsy.
The CBD oil starts as a cultivar selected in part for its extremely low THC level, the psychoactive chemical that gives marijuana users a high. Industrial hemp must not contain any more than .3 percent THC. The pilot program under which Kentucky farmers are able to grow hemp is heavily regulated at both the state and federal levels, and two weeks before a crop is harvested, state officials test the plant to make sure the THC levels are within the mandated limits.
Before Wooton, of Leslie County, began giving her son CBD, Dravet Syndrome resulted in hundreds of seizures a day for Eli with many of those seizures depriving his growing brain of oxygen. The seizures stopped on the same day he began taking CBD provided free to his family from Louisville-based Green Remedy, a company that provides products made or extracted from industrial hemp, a crop only recently permitted to grow in Kentucky and one that remains in the pilot program phase through the Kentucky Department of Agriculture.
In October 2013, Eli underwent surgery to have a vagal nerve stimulation device implanted into his brain, like a pacemaker for a heart patient. The following year he suffered a stroke. While the number of seizures decreased with the implanted device, little Eli's busy brain just couldn't catch a break, seizing at least 100 times a day until July 6, 2015.
"Eli was nonverbal," Wooton said. "He's autistic. He's ADHD. He has this rare diagnosis with intractable epilepsy. He has low muscle tone. Here's what's happened: the doctors told us with the VNS that Eli would probably never live a normal life, that he would never talk. He would never have self-help skills because of the brain damage that's been done because of all the seizures and the downtime from no oxygen to the brain.
"In two days after starting the CBD, we got words. He was trying to say 'daddy.' He called me 'mommom.' He called his younger sister Lucy, 'sis sis.'
"Just simple words, in two weeks we got sentences. The first thing he ever said to me in a sentence, he got me by the hand and we keep our keys hanging on a rack in the kitchen," Wooton said. "He gets me by the hand, points to the rack and says 'mommom, bye-bye, car key.' I said, 'Eli, do you want to go somewhere. Do you want to go bye-bye?' And he got this big smile and clapped his hands.
"From that point forward, prayers have been answered. It was like we had won the lottery. We were starting to meet our son for the first time."
Hemp growers want to help the 'babies'
Eli's medical history files are larger than probably the combined files of any random 10 adults 10 times his age. In 2013 alone, Eli and his mom made 25 trips to Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. He was admitted 17 times and had to be flown by emergency medical helicopter five times. In addition to epilepsy, Eli has a rare gene mutation.
It's his story and the stories of the many other children that in part convinced southcentral Kentucky farmers Mike and Kim Coleman to grow hemp for the first time this year. They are contract growers for Green Remedy and are approved through the state to grow 10 acres of industrial hemp in 2016.
Chad Wilson of Bowling Green, one of the founding partners of Green Remedy and the vice president of marketing for the company, reached out to the Colemans with Eli's story and several other childrens' stories and asked if they would be willing to give hemp a go on their family tobacco farm.
"We decided to get into the hemp growing because of the family farm," Kim Coleman said. "Tobacco is a thing of the past. It's getting harder and harder every year trying to make it just on tobacco. So we're trying to implement the hemp. Plus it does a wonderful job with children. That's the main two reasons we got into it.
"I had talked to Chad at Green Remedy and he was telling me how it was helping the children with seizures. That really touched my heart. It's amazing what that does for these babies."
Unlike other crops, on which pesticides can be used, the Colemans' industrial hemp crop is much more labor intensive. Kim Coleman estimates that she spends five to six hours a day working just on the hemp crop. If she sees a bug or worms, she must hand-pick those off the plants. They can't be sprayed.
Even though the crop is challenging and she's not sure how much money industrial hemp will ultimately be worth to her family farm, Kim Coleman is willing to try for the sake of the children she and her husband hope to help.
"I'm willing to do it to help children and help subsidize my income," said Kim Coleman, a lifelong farmer in this region.
Outgrowing a bad reputation
If it looks like pot and smells like pot, it must be pot. Right?
Not so for industrial hemp, Wilson said. And that's the stigma his company and growers are fighting against.
"Everywhere we go the first thing we get is, 'You all are pot dealers.' We are trying to bring back an agricultural crop to give our farmers some hope. It's to give small farmers an option. Hemp has the ability to do that," Wilson said.
"We really do need it back in Kentucky," he said.
The United States is the largest consumer of hemp products.
Growers and processors want to alleviate any fear about the crop being marijuana and instead want to educate the public about the number of products that can be made using hemp, which is a renewable source. Hemp plants can be used to make everything from health and beauty aids to fuel and fibers.
And the CBD that Green Remedy is extracting from hemp at its Louisville facility is gaining a following among parents like Rita Wooton, who have exhausted all other treatment methods for their children.
While on one hand, the federal government classifies cannabis as having no medical value by making marijuana a Schedule 1 drug, the U.S. government holds a patent, No. 6630507, on CBD that can be obtained both through industrial hemp and marijuana plants.
"Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism," according to the online abstract filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. "This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and HIV dementia."
Currently, only CBD obtained through industrial hemp is legal for sale in Kentucky.
Through hemp, Wilson hopes to once again farm in Kentucky, and he has plans to set up an agritourism hemp farm here in Warren County, provided hemp remains a legal crop.
Wilson's family lost their farm to the corporate farms of the 1980s.
"I think this is a revitalization of that small family farm," he said. "That's what I believe hemp is more than anything to the state of Kentucky."
Once he sets up his farming business, it will be a training center for farmers and a cloning and breeding center for the cultivars, he said.
"We want to open it up to the public and do tours," he said.
He wants the public to be aware of all of the products that can be made with hemp.
One acre of renewable hemp that grows in roughly 90-120 days in Kentucky will produce as much paper as 3.8 acres of 75-year-old trees, Wilson said.
"What we're challenging is the old ways of doing things. We have to find more green and more sustainable options, and hemp happens to be that plant. We can make paints, stains, engine oils, biofuels.
"It's time to be more sustainable not just for my future, but for my grandkids," Wilson said.
Out of options
Wooton credits CBD extracted from hemp for improving her son's life.
"We did everything that we were asked to do in the medical world. We had run out of options, and we had run out of hope," Wooton said.
Wilson saw Eli's story and heard about Wooton's passionate plea to state lawmakers in 2014 to legalize CBD. He found her on Facebook and told her his company wanted to offer their product to her son free of charge.
"The only thing I knew was this: if we didn't figure out something quick, he was going to die. Your body and brain just can't keep going through seizure after seizure. He is six now. He runs, jumps and plays like a normal child. He is showing interest in feeding himself. He is showing interest in potty training," she said.
When she took Eli for his first doctor's visit after starting CBD, she told the doctors she wanted them to meet her son, really meet him.
Eli spoke and his doctors cried.
"He's part of the research," Wilson said of Eli. "He has some fabulous neurologists who have open hearts and minds and want to help people."
CBD has not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It is sold the same way as nutritional supplements such as vitamins.
Wilson would welcome study of the product from the pharmaceutical industry.
He provided CBD to his father after his father had a stroke. Wilson said the CBD helped in his father's recovery.
Extraction process designed to grow
Wilson is proud of the extraction process his company is using in Louisville.
He and has partners have a 30,000-square-foot facility and have invested in clean, carbon dioxide supercritical extraction, the same method used to decaffeinate coffee.
The facility has one cylinder that is about 15 feet tall and 10 to 12 feet wide that holds the carbon dioxide.
Prepared, dried material is loaded into thick pressurization chambers. The carbon dioxide comes in as a gas, and when it enters the chamber, it turns from a gas into a liquid performing the extraction. After the process, the chamber reverses and turns the carbon dioxide back into gas and evacuates it from the chamber leaving just the clean extract.
The extraction machine has nine patents.
"It's a really neat process," Wilson said. "When you see it happening, it's almost like another form of physical matter. Hopefully, this year with all the crops that come in we should have enough that we will be a Kentucky Proud product.
"We can extract on a good day 400 pounds of prepared product a day. We designed that machine so that it can grow with our company."
A Scottsville boy using Green Remedy CBD has been seizure-free for more than two years, Wilson said.
"We have our priorities right. We have several children that we help — people, planet and profit," he said.
Acreage of hemp crops increasing
There is no sunset date on the pilot program, said Doris Hamilton, industrial hemp program manager for the KDA.
In 2015, the KDA recorded 900 acres of hemp planted through the pilot program. So far this year more than 2,200 acres have been planted. A total of 4,500 acres were approved through the strict application process.
Of the acres planted in 2015, one-third were dedicated to fiber production, one-third to grain and one-third to CBD production, Hamilton said.
To prevent industrial hemp crops from being cut down by police during Kentucky State Police marijuana eradication efforts, the KDA provides GPS coordinates to Kentucky State Police for all of the legally planted hemp crops in the state.
However, that information may not always filter down to every agency as the South Central Kentucky Drug Task Force learned recently when they received an anonymous tip about a marijuana grow in Logan County. Upon closer inspection, Director Jacky Hunt learned that the grow was not marijuana but was instead industrial hemp.
The Department of Agriculture is making every attempt to communicate openly and clearly with all law enforcement, Hamilton said.
"Any time any kind of hiccups come up, we're all agreeable to and looking for resolutions," she said.
News Moderator: Katelyn Baker 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Hemp Gives Hope To Family Of Little Boy With Rare Form Of Epilepsy
Author: Deborah Highland
Contact: 270-781-1700
Photo Credit: None Found
Website: Daily News
As it grows, it looks and smells just like marijuana, but the industrial hemp from which cannabidiol, also known as CBD, is extracted won't get Wooton's 6-year-old son Eli high. What has happened since Wooton began giving her son the CBD oil dissolvable mouth strips in July 2015 is nothing short of remarkable and has outpaced any expectation doctors had for Eli, who suffers from a rare form of epilepsy.
The CBD oil starts as a cultivar selected in part for its extremely low THC level, the psychoactive chemical that gives marijuana users a high. Industrial hemp must not contain any more than .3 percent THC. The pilot program under which Kentucky farmers are able to grow hemp is heavily regulated at both the state and federal levels, and two weeks before a crop is harvested, state officials test the plant to make sure the THC levels are within the mandated limits.
Before Wooton, of Leslie County, began giving her son CBD, Dravet Syndrome resulted in hundreds of seizures a day for Eli with many of those seizures depriving his growing brain of oxygen. The seizures stopped on the same day he began taking CBD provided free to his family from Louisville-based Green Remedy, a company that provides products made or extracted from industrial hemp, a crop only recently permitted to grow in Kentucky and one that remains in the pilot program phase through the Kentucky Department of Agriculture.
In October 2013, Eli underwent surgery to have a vagal nerve stimulation device implanted into his brain, like a pacemaker for a heart patient. The following year he suffered a stroke. While the number of seizures decreased with the implanted device, little Eli's busy brain just couldn't catch a break, seizing at least 100 times a day until July 6, 2015.
"Eli was nonverbal," Wooton said. "He's autistic. He's ADHD. He has this rare diagnosis with intractable epilepsy. He has low muscle tone. Here's what's happened: the doctors told us with the VNS that Eli would probably never live a normal life, that he would never talk. He would never have self-help skills because of the brain damage that's been done because of all the seizures and the downtime from no oxygen to the brain.
"In two days after starting the CBD, we got words. He was trying to say 'daddy.' He called me 'mommom.' He called his younger sister Lucy, 'sis sis.'
"Just simple words, in two weeks we got sentences. The first thing he ever said to me in a sentence, he got me by the hand and we keep our keys hanging on a rack in the kitchen," Wooton said. "He gets me by the hand, points to the rack and says 'mommom, bye-bye, car key.' I said, 'Eli, do you want to go somewhere. Do you want to go bye-bye?' And he got this big smile and clapped his hands.
"From that point forward, prayers have been answered. It was like we had won the lottery. We were starting to meet our son for the first time."
Hemp growers want to help the 'babies'
Eli's medical history files are larger than probably the combined files of any random 10 adults 10 times his age. In 2013 alone, Eli and his mom made 25 trips to Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. He was admitted 17 times and had to be flown by emergency medical helicopter five times. In addition to epilepsy, Eli has a rare gene mutation.
It's his story and the stories of the many other children that in part convinced southcentral Kentucky farmers Mike and Kim Coleman to grow hemp for the first time this year. They are contract growers for Green Remedy and are approved through the state to grow 10 acres of industrial hemp in 2016.
Chad Wilson of Bowling Green, one of the founding partners of Green Remedy and the vice president of marketing for the company, reached out to the Colemans with Eli's story and several other childrens' stories and asked if they would be willing to give hemp a go on their family tobacco farm.
"We decided to get into the hemp growing because of the family farm," Kim Coleman said. "Tobacco is a thing of the past. It's getting harder and harder every year trying to make it just on tobacco. So we're trying to implement the hemp. Plus it does a wonderful job with children. That's the main two reasons we got into it.
"I had talked to Chad at Green Remedy and he was telling me how it was helping the children with seizures. That really touched my heart. It's amazing what that does for these babies."
Unlike other crops, on which pesticides can be used, the Colemans' industrial hemp crop is much more labor intensive. Kim Coleman estimates that she spends five to six hours a day working just on the hemp crop. If she sees a bug or worms, she must hand-pick those off the plants. They can't be sprayed.
Even though the crop is challenging and she's not sure how much money industrial hemp will ultimately be worth to her family farm, Kim Coleman is willing to try for the sake of the children she and her husband hope to help.
"I'm willing to do it to help children and help subsidize my income," said Kim Coleman, a lifelong farmer in this region.
Outgrowing a bad reputation
If it looks like pot and smells like pot, it must be pot. Right?
Not so for industrial hemp, Wilson said. And that's the stigma his company and growers are fighting against.
"Everywhere we go the first thing we get is, 'You all are pot dealers.' We are trying to bring back an agricultural crop to give our farmers some hope. It's to give small farmers an option. Hemp has the ability to do that," Wilson said.
"We really do need it back in Kentucky," he said.
The United States is the largest consumer of hemp products.
Growers and processors want to alleviate any fear about the crop being marijuana and instead want to educate the public about the number of products that can be made using hemp, which is a renewable source. Hemp plants can be used to make everything from health and beauty aids to fuel and fibers.
And the CBD that Green Remedy is extracting from hemp at its Louisville facility is gaining a following among parents like Rita Wooton, who have exhausted all other treatment methods for their children.
While on one hand, the federal government classifies cannabis as having no medical value by making marijuana a Schedule 1 drug, the U.S. government holds a patent, No. 6630507, on CBD that can be obtained both through industrial hemp and marijuana plants.
"Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism," according to the online abstract filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. "This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and HIV dementia."
Currently, only CBD obtained through industrial hemp is legal for sale in Kentucky.
Through hemp, Wilson hopes to once again farm in Kentucky, and he has plans to set up an agritourism hemp farm here in Warren County, provided hemp remains a legal crop.
Wilson's family lost their farm to the corporate farms of the 1980s.
"I think this is a revitalization of that small family farm," he said. "That's what I believe hemp is more than anything to the state of Kentucky."
Once he sets up his farming business, it will be a training center for farmers and a cloning and breeding center for the cultivars, he said.
"We want to open it up to the public and do tours," he said.
He wants the public to be aware of all of the products that can be made with hemp.
One acre of renewable hemp that grows in roughly 90-120 days in Kentucky will produce as much paper as 3.8 acres of 75-year-old trees, Wilson said.
"What we're challenging is the old ways of doing things. We have to find more green and more sustainable options, and hemp happens to be that plant. We can make paints, stains, engine oils, biofuels.
"It's time to be more sustainable not just for my future, but for my grandkids," Wilson said.
Out of options
Wooton credits CBD extracted from hemp for improving her son's life.
"We did everything that we were asked to do in the medical world. We had run out of options, and we had run out of hope," Wooton said.
Wilson saw Eli's story and heard about Wooton's passionate plea to state lawmakers in 2014 to legalize CBD. He found her on Facebook and told her his company wanted to offer their product to her son free of charge.
"The only thing I knew was this: if we didn't figure out something quick, he was going to die. Your body and brain just can't keep going through seizure after seizure. He is six now. He runs, jumps and plays like a normal child. He is showing interest in feeding himself. He is showing interest in potty training," she said.
When she took Eli for his first doctor's visit after starting CBD, she told the doctors she wanted them to meet her son, really meet him.
Eli spoke and his doctors cried.
"He's part of the research," Wilson said of Eli. "He has some fabulous neurologists who have open hearts and minds and want to help people."
CBD has not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It is sold the same way as nutritional supplements such as vitamins.
Wilson would welcome study of the product from the pharmaceutical industry.
He provided CBD to his father after his father had a stroke. Wilson said the CBD helped in his father's recovery.
Extraction process designed to grow
Wilson is proud of the extraction process his company is using in Louisville.
He and has partners have a 30,000-square-foot facility and have invested in clean, carbon dioxide supercritical extraction, the same method used to decaffeinate coffee.
The facility has one cylinder that is about 15 feet tall and 10 to 12 feet wide that holds the carbon dioxide.
Prepared, dried material is loaded into thick pressurization chambers. The carbon dioxide comes in as a gas, and when it enters the chamber, it turns from a gas into a liquid performing the extraction. After the process, the chamber reverses and turns the carbon dioxide back into gas and evacuates it from the chamber leaving just the clean extract.
The extraction machine has nine patents.
"It's a really neat process," Wilson said. "When you see it happening, it's almost like another form of physical matter. Hopefully, this year with all the crops that come in we should have enough that we will be a Kentucky Proud product.
"We can extract on a good day 400 pounds of prepared product a day. We designed that machine so that it can grow with our company."
A Scottsville boy using Green Remedy CBD has been seizure-free for more than two years, Wilson said.
"We have our priorities right. We have several children that we help — people, planet and profit," he said.
Acreage of hemp crops increasing
There is no sunset date on the pilot program, said Doris Hamilton, industrial hemp program manager for the KDA.
In 2015, the KDA recorded 900 acres of hemp planted through the pilot program. So far this year more than 2,200 acres have been planted. A total of 4,500 acres were approved through the strict application process.
Of the acres planted in 2015, one-third were dedicated to fiber production, one-third to grain and one-third to CBD production, Hamilton said.
To prevent industrial hemp crops from being cut down by police during Kentucky State Police marijuana eradication efforts, the KDA provides GPS coordinates to Kentucky State Police for all of the legally planted hemp crops in the state.
However, that information may not always filter down to every agency as the South Central Kentucky Drug Task Force learned recently when they received an anonymous tip about a marijuana grow in Logan County. Upon closer inspection, Director Jacky Hunt learned that the grow was not marijuana but was instead industrial hemp.
The Department of Agriculture is making every attempt to communicate openly and clearly with all law enforcement, Hamilton said.
"Any time any kind of hiccups come up, we're all agreeable to and looking for resolutions," she said.
News Moderator: Katelyn Baker 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Hemp Gives Hope To Family Of Little Boy With Rare Form Of Epilepsy
Author: Deborah Highland
Contact: 270-781-1700
Photo Credit: None Found
Website: Daily News
