UPDATE May 16, 2014: For additional information on the timeline of the Weaver family involvement, see today's post, Joshua Weaver clarifies timeline of his family's involvement with MN medical cannabis politics.
Apparently, Melin was so inspired by the Weaver's story, that she authored a bill before even the family learned that medical cannabis could helped their daughter--and then kept news of her inspiration secret until months later. Super powers! [end update]
In yesterday's post, Pass the stealth dutchies: Melin disses former allies in pediatric cannabis Facebook group, Bluestem looked at claims that Representative Carly Melin (DFL-Hibbing) posted on May 10, 2014 to the MN Pediatric Cannabis Therapy closed Facebook group.
In the post, Melin slammed Minnesotans for Compassionate Care and its lobbyist, Heather Azzi, as using the drive to legalize medical marijuana as a pretext for moving forward the legalization of recreational marijuana. She noted that the Senate version of the bill, authored by Senator Scott Dibble, was written by this group.
Her bill, the Ranger said, was written by "attorneys employed by the House, and by legislators with input from the Board of Pharmacy, MN Medical Association, Department of Health, and manufacturers from Colorado."
Melin refers to the "compromise" language she introduced on via SF2470,which didn't turn up until May 1.
As we noted yesterday, Melin's claims create a peculiar reconstruction of the past, as she had worked with Minnesotans For Compassionate Care for months--without a single publicly voiced qualm about this stealth agenda.
Two additional pieces of information have emerged that leave Bluestem with more questions about Melin's shifting frames.
First, after reading all of the posts on Angie Weaver's delicious blog, Cupcakes and Home School, Bluestem found that the first reference to medical cannabis as a treatment for Dravet Syndrome was posted on June 9, 2013, in Medicinal marijuana stops seizures, brings hope to a little Black Forest girl, a reprint of an article by Barb Cotter in the Colorado Springs Gazette on the same day.
The next post on Cupcakes and Home School is the July 10, 2013 entry by Angie Weaver, Hope For Those Battling Dravet Syndrome, in which the devoted mother writes:
After a week of caring for my daughter during her night time seizure, taking her to be poked and prodded for her pre-op physical for yet another surgery, and comforting her while she sobbed in the middle of the night, I opened an email from the Hubs titled- I hear Colorado is nice. He sent me an article from a newspaper in Colorado about a girl battling Dravet Syndrome that was having success with medicinal marijuana. It was such a great article that I had to share it. Ironically, our daughter looks so much like the girl in the story-even the same haircut!
There are no words to describe the feeling of watching your child suffer everyday, knowing there is nothing you can do to take the pain away. The Hubs and I will do anything to save our daughter, maybe that will mean moving to Colorado.
A reasonable reader might infer from the two posts from the summer of 2013 that the June article--revealed in the July 2013 post to have come to Angie Weaver in an email from "the Hubs."
But later news coverage suggests otherwise. In an article printed in the ECM Publishers chain in December 2013, we read:
She become interested in carrying medical marijuana legislation, Melin said, after learning of a family in her district whose 7-year-old daughter suffers from Dravet syndrome. The child suffers as many as 400 seizures a month, Melin said, and the first time her parents heard her utter a sound for many weeks was when she began to cry after breaking her arm in three places, with bone jutting through the skin, in a condition-related mishap. . . .
Melin doesn’t want to see parents of children with Dravet syndrome need to flee Minnesota to seek treatment for their child.
While the Weaver blog has chronicled their daughter's illness since January 2013, they didn't mention medical cannabis or moving to Colorado until after the bill was introduced--nor did those posts include mention of Melin's legislation.
On January 19, 2014, Forum Communications's John Lundy writes in Hibbing couple look to medical marijuana to improve daughter's life:
Amelia has Dravet (pronounced dra-VAY) syndrome, a rare and catastrophic form of epilepsy that attacks young children. Most antiepileptic medicines aren’t recommended for Dravet syndrome; the few that are haven’t helped Amelia.
“We have all but exhausted our options,” said Angie Weaver, 32.
But the Weavers have a glimmer of hope.
They’ve learned about it through TV shows and newspaper articles and especially through the online community of parents who have children with the same condition. Some of those parents tell of a treatment that has made an enormous difference in their children, allowing them to bring their seizures under control and to start to regain lost functions.
But the treatment is illegal in Minnesota. It’s a medical form of marijuana, taken as a pill or in an oil solution.
Amelia’s story, and those of people suffering with cancer, glaucoma, debilitating pain and other conditions, led state Rep. Carly Melin, DFL-Hibbing, to author legislation that would legalize marijuana for medical uses in Minnesota.
A number of news reports tout Melin's superpowers as the House DFL Millennial Brand Leader, but none have reported on her ability to see into the future when drafting bills.
But then, in talking to Lundy, the Weaver focus on a February 2013 video, rather than the June article that marks the first mention on their blog of Charlotte's Web and moving to Colorado. Moreover Josh Weaver echoes his wife's July 2013 observation on the blog that their daughter resembles the girl in the Colorado article.
The Weavers were dubious when first told about the possibility of treating Dravet syndrome with medical marijuana. But then one of Josh Weaver’s colleagues at Hibbing Community College told him about Charlotte Figi. The video they watched (see below) showed a 6-year-old girl with short, dark hair like Amelia’s. Charlotte’s mother, Paige Figi, explained in the video that Charlotte had been diagnosed at 2½ with Dravet syndrome, and every possible FDA-approved medication had been tried.
Charlotte’s symptoms were, if anything, even more drastic than Amelia’s.
In the first seven days after taking the medical marijuana, Charlotte was seizure-free, her mother said. Over the next nine months, she went from having 300 seizures a week to zero or one.
Watching it, the Weavers were transfixed.
“The little girl looks like Amelia; the story sounds the same,” Josh Weaver said. “It’s like watching our life, happening somewhere else.”
The difference is that Charlotte Figi’s somewhere else is Colorado. The medical marijuana compound she takes, cultivated to be extremely low in the THC that gives marijuana its psychoactive effects, is grown there.
The Weavers don’t want to move to Colorado.
Josh Weaver, 33, likes his job in the information technology department at the community college, and the health insurance is good, they said. Both grew up in Hibbing, and their family, friends, and their church are here. Having a child who has multiple seizures means most babysitting options aren’t available, but they can call on their parents.
In Colorado, all of that would be gone. . .
Bluestem hopes the Weavers aren't confused about when they first heard the story of Charlotte's Web. We still can't figure out the reticience on either the Weavers or Melin to talk about Amelia's part in inspiring the Hibbing lawmaker to introduce HF1818., companion to Dibble's SF1641.
Of course, Melin now thinks that the copy-cat companion bill of her own HF1818 is a totally horrible scheme to push Minnesota toward legalizing recreational pot, so we can't fault anyone involved in this legislative and public relations history for being confused by these varying accounts.
Meanwhile, we've found the undated Testimony of Angie Weaver on the website of Minnesotans for Compassionate Care's website. While there's a 2013 copyright on the website's "skin," the page wasn't captured by the Wayback Machine during 2013, and 2014 television ads are also on a page bearing the 2013 copyright "skin." We suspect that the Weaver testimony dates from sometime after June 2013.
We have calls into other sources and will update this ongoing research as we learn more.
Bluestem hopes that the House and Senate conference committee report creates a report recommending a law closer to the Senate version, so that not only the Weavers, but many suffering Minnesotans have a new line treatment for what ails them.
Screenshot: The first post at Angie Weaver's Cupcakes and Home School blog that mentions moving to Colorado (July 2013), with the headline for the June 9, 2013 Colorado Spring Gazette article reprinted on the site by Angie Weaver.
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