Connect with us

Washington D.C. Permits Medical Cannabis in Public Schools

Published

on

[dropcap class=”kp-dropcap”]D.[/dropcap]C. Public Schools clarified its policy on medical cannabis, allowing for healthcare professionals to give medical cannabis to students in public schools.

Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton wrote a letter to Washington D.C. mayor’s and council stating that students who need medical cannabis should be able to use their medicine at school. Norton sent the letter in support of 11-year-old Zoey Carty, who attends Friendship Ideal Academy in Northwest and suffers from frontal lobe epilepsy that is treated with an inhaler that administers medical cannabis.

“She had really more bad days than good days,” said Dawn Lee-Carty, Zoey’s mother. “And to sit there and watch my daughter suffer and fight and go through all that and to see her now thrive off of a plant with no synthetic anything, it’s just a plant and understanding how to break down the plant, I have to fight for it.”

Current D.C. law allows for minors to qualify for medical cannabis, but the law is silent on the use of medical cannabis in schools. D.C. Public Schools said its policy is to permit medical cannabis to qualifying students, but charter schools are able to make their own policies. D.C. recently expanded its medical cannabis program by allowing the use of out-of-state medical cannabis cards to purchase cannabis.

“That’s good. That’s good, and now we need to make it 50 states,” Lee-Carty said. “I mean I’m so happy that D.C. schools are able to do this, but it should be able to touch all 50 states because this is not an isolated incident.”

In another reform to the medical cannabis program in D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Department of Health announced emergency rulemaking that allows D.C. residents who wish to enroll in the medical cannabis program can use REAL ID driver’s licenses as proof of residency.

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *