Dying Teen Survives Cancer with the Help of Cannabis

In Britain, Deryn Blackwell was suffering from an aggressive form of leukemia and was at his deathbed. Round after round of chemotherapy and radiotherapy proved unsuccessful. That is, until his mother Callie had him start medicating with cannabis, which finally eased his symptoms and perhaps saved his life. Deryn’s case has aroused the attention of scientists, who believe cannabis may hold the key to curing aggressive, untreatable forms of cancer.

Deryn’s disease caused his fingertips to turn hard and black from a “superbug infection.” At the time, is death was imminent. “Please tell them to cut my hand off,” Deryn’s mother said she remembers hearing her son tell her. To make things worse, Deryn, who was then 14 years old, was beginning to become addicted to the drugs he was forced to take.

Ms. Blackwell and her husband attempted to get a prescription for Bedrocan, a cannabis-based painkiller from a doctor, to no avail, and ended up buying black market cannabis instead. “I thought: ‘what have I got to lose? He’s dying anyway.’ The effects of it blew my mind. It wasn’t what I expected,” Blackwell told ITV’s This Morning. Blackwell made her own tincture using a rice cooker and adding vegetable glycerin. She had Deryn vaporize the mixture, and 10 minutes later her son said the pain was decreasing. From then on, Deryn would apply 5ml of the tincture every time his pain started to return. Blackwell says that she’s no longer sure if her son is dying.

Blackwell decided to write a novel, The Boy in 7 Billion, about her son’s journey to wellness with the help of cannabis. “We took a decision that will horrify many parents reading this—and horrified me, too,” Blackwell wrote. “After all, I’d never seen anything positive come of smoking cannabis, and in my days working in nightclubs, illegal drugs had been my enemy. But if it could help my darling boy escape his daily torment, I was willing to try it.”

Deryn is now 17 years old, healthy and has regrown all of his hair. A new £10 million research program at Oxford University will explore many of the benefits of medical cannabis. Peter McCormick, a cellular neuroscience and biology researcher at the University of Surrey, said Deryn’s story “validates that we need more research into what is going on.”