12-Year-Old With Epilepsy Sues Jeff Sessions Over Pot

A 12-year-old suing the federal government may have a whiff of adorableness. But for Alexis Bortell, who filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Jeff Sessions last fall, it’s a choice she had to make to save her life. Bortell has epilepsy and Sessions has made it his mission to make it impossible for her to access the only drug that has kept her seizures at bay: cannabis.

A Scream of Terror

Bortell doesn’t remember her first seizure. But her father, Dean Bortell, does.

“We were literally folding clothes and Alexis was sleeping on the couch,” he told Newsweek. “All of a sudden I heard her make this shriek—I mean, it was a scream of terror,” he said. “I look over and Alexis is stiff as a board, on her back, spasming.”

After several months in the dark—at first, Dean suspected his daughter had a brain-eating amoeba on account of headlines about them that summer—Alexis was diagnosed with epilepsy in 2013.

Three years ago, Alexis began taking medical marijuana and her seizures disappeared. But that treatment option is threatened by an aggressive federal crackdown on medicinal cannabis led by Sessions, who is also the acting director of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Her day in court—February 14, at a New York City federal courthouse—is fast approaching. Alexis won’t be there in person, but her lawyer, Michael Hiller, thinks the ruling will go their way.

“We are very optimistic that the case is going to come out the way it should, which is that the Controlled Substances Act is going to be found unconstitutional,” Hiller said. Several other plaintiffs—a former professional football player, a veteran and another child—are also included.

Out of Options

The basic outline of Alexis’s story has been well reported: horrible seizures forced her family to move to Colorado from Texas where she could use products with compounds derived from marijuana. But due to the concentration of THC, also known as tetrahydrocannabinol, in one of the products she uses, Alexis is unable to cross state lines, board an airplane or set foot on a military base or in other federal buildings and lands.

Biologically, Alexis’s problem begins in the left frontal lobe of her brain. Normally brain cells communicate with each other using electrical and chemical signals. Epileptic seizures happen when those signals go haywire.

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