Conservative Family Among Those Marching For Marijuana In Dallas
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NORTH TEXAS (CBS 11 NEWS) - Most parents don't want their kids using marijuana... and then there are those who desperately do. Some of those families are fighting for change in Texas this weekend.
The Dallas Marijuana March will be held at City Hall on Saturday and is open to the public. While one might expect to find all kinds of people at the event, the attendance of some may surprise you.
The Bortell's are a self-described conservative, Christian family. So, you would never expect Dean and Analiza Bortell to be advocates for medical marijuana – but they are.
When Dean Bortell was asked what he would have said if someone told him he would one day be a proponent of marijuana he said, "I'd have told you [that] you were absolutely insane. There's no way I'd be involved in cannabis in anyway."
Then his daughter Alex had her first seizure, at the age of seven. "I usually black out," the little girl explained.
The now 9-year-old was on the living room couch when the attack happened. It's an event her mother, Analiza, remembers it vividly. "She stood up, she was shaking [and] her mouth was open."
Analiza said she cradled her daughter and begged her to wake up. Dean said, "Nothing in this world can prepare you for what we witnessed."
Alex was later diagnosed with epilepsy. Doctors prescribed different medications for Alex, but the family says all of them made her epilepsy worse. "I felt sick and really weird," she said.
Dean said things went from bad to worse and Alex started " having seizures all the time."
Research lead them to cannabis oil, a treatment made from the marijuana plant that the family claims doctors in Colorado recommended.
Alexis remembered what the grown-ups told her. "They said it was safer than the medicine I was taking and would probably help stop my seizures."
Alex now has a certificate from the state of Colorado to receive medical marijuana there, something she says she's never tried because it remains illegal in Texas. "I don't want to leave Texas. I'm a Texas girl!" She and her parents are now working with a group of 85 families, lobbying on behalf of their children for medical marijuana laws here in Texas. Others in the group have already moved to Colorado to begin treating their children with cannabis oil.
The Bortells say, if necessary, they will too. "If she falters or we think her health is in danger in any way, we would go."
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