Talking Pictures: Sam’s Cure

[Narrator] Two and a half years ago,

Christmas 2012,

my family went to London with the hope

of saving our son's life.

We went to try a medicine derived from cannabis

that we hoped would stop Sam's unrelenting seizures.

I'm Fred Vogelstein.

I'm a writer in the Bay Area.

I wrote about our quest,

and photographer Elinor Carucci

made these beautiful and moving images

of our family for Wired.

Sam doesn't have the kind of seizures you see on TV.

They only last about 10 seconds,

but when they are uncontrolled,

which has been often,

he can have more than 100 a day.

I'm still haunted by them,

and I've seen them tens of thousands of times.

We'd already tried two dozen medications

without success.

We tried cannabis-based potions in the US, too.

The compound we were after is called cannabidiol, or CBD.

It doesn't get you high.

The problem is extracting it from the cannabis plant.

It's difficult,

and it's made even harder in the US

because of our cannabis laws.

But in London a drug company, GW Pharmaceuticals,

was making CBD on an industrial scale

as a component of another medicine,

and they agreed to let Sam come to Britain

to try CBD alone for epilepsy.

Sam responded immediately.

The day he arrived in London,

with his twin sister Beatrice and my wife Evelyn,

he had nearly 70 seizures,

and three days later, he had only six.

It took four months to get the FDA and DEA

approvals we needed to import the medicine into the US,

but today, not only is Sam nearly seizure free,

he fences three times a week,

and is a normal active teenager.

His experience appears to have jumpstarted

GW's development of a new drug to treat epilepsy.

The drug, Epidiolex, could get FDA approval by 2018.

(upbeat music)