Eight years ago, Macon, Georgia’s 13 WMAZ introduced audiences to a four-year-old girl named Haleigh Cox, whose family turned to cannabis oil to help treat her seizures. Recently, they caught up with Cox and former state representative Allen Peake who began the battle to get access to medical marijuana.
According to both parties, it hasn’t been easy, and the fight’s not over.
“I used to have to watch her every minute of every day,” says Janea Cox, Haleigh’s mother. “She would stop breathing and it was so hard to take even a moment’s time away from her.”
Back in 2014, Haleigh would have as many as 200 seizures a day, and doctors told Janea her daughter would most likely not live past the age of 5.
“Honestly, cannabis oil was our last resort,” Cox says. “There was nothing else we could do for her. We had done surgeries, we had done all the meds the doctors kept throwing at her.”
She reached out to then-State Representative Peake for help, who says he asked himself what he would do if Haleigh was his child.
“The answer to that question was, ‘I’d crawl over broken glass to do whatever it took to stop the seizures in this beautiful little girl,'” he tells 13 WMAZ.
Peake began filing bills in 2014 to make cannabis oil or medical marijuana available for people with severe medical problems like Haleigh’s. His bill failed the first year, but Governor Nathan Deal signed it in 2015, calling it “Haleigh’s Hope.”
It created a limited list of medical conditions that qualified and said patients needed state approval to receive the treatment. However, Peake and Cox agree it’s not enough.
“It left a gaping hole,” Peake says. “How do we get the product? There was no legal way to access the product here in Georgia, so that was our next step. We began to work on that in 2016, 2017, and 2018. We actually were never able to get it done.”
During the fight, the Cox family moved to Colorado where it is easier to access cannabis oil and they can go directly to a grower. Haleigh uses a strain that’s named for her, also called “Haleigh’s Hope.”
Now, at nearly 13 years old, Haleigh only has one to two seizures—on a bad day.
“I was so worried I was going to lose my child at such a young age,” Cox says. “I didn’t even know if she knew who I was or if she knew I was even in front of her or around. Now, I know she looks for me. She calls for me.”
Even though Peake is now out of office, he is still working to help Georgia families by distributing cannabis oil to people who need it.
“We give it to Georgia families who reach out to us for free,” he explains. “We failed in being able to pass legislation that would allow an infrastructure here in Georgia, so we’re going to do the next best thing.”
Peake and Cox both hope Georgia will improve access to the treatment that helped Haleigh so she and her family can go home.
“Figure out how to get it growing so that more kids can have access to it,” Cox says.
“We shouldn’t be forcing Georgia citizens to have to leave our state to go somewhere else to find a product that is working for them, and providing a better quality of life for them,” Peake adds.
But Janea says she’s just grateful they found the treatment that saved Haleigh’s life.
“She wouldn’t be here without it, I know that for sure,” Cox says.
According to Peake, there are 20,000 people on the registry. He hopes to see those people getting their needs met in Georgia instead of going to other states that have already legalized growing medical marijuana.
