“Congress is poised to re-criminalize this plant and again put hundreds of thousands of patients, and the people that love them, in jeopardy.”
By Amy Dawn Bourlon-Hilterbran, Moms Mobilized
Before my son, Austin, was even five years old, he had been prescribed a series of pharmaceuticals for his epilepsy—opioids, benzodiazepines, rufinamide and more. That continued for years. The side effects were absolutely awful. The sheer number and potency nearly killed him several times, but they never stopped his daily seizures.
By the time he was eleven, his body was shutting down from the daily pills that had hideous physical, emotional and mental repercussions. While he was on life support, the doctors told us that if the pharmaceutical damage to his organs didn’t kill him within two years, the seizures would.
“Just take him home,” the doctors said, “there’s nothing more we can do here.” It was the most terrifying, infuriating, overwhelming moment of my life. The doctors were giving up on my son because the pharmaceuticals they had been prescribing for years had done more damage than they could repair and the seizures remained, worsened.
We couldn’t just watch our son die. We refused to accept that, we had no idea what we were going to do, what we had to do, but we knew we needed to do something for Austin. Whatever it took to help him, that was our mission.
There was a lot of information on hemp, CBD, medical marijuana gaining traction in the news with doctors and scientists speaking in favor of its potential. But my husband was a fireman in our beloved hometown, and trying plant medicines could make him a felon. Our entire family would be at risk. We could lose everything, go to jail and lose Austin.
That refusal to give up, and the desperate attempt to find lawful options, led our family to uproot our lives in Oklahoma and move to Colorado—one of the only states where families could legally access hemp and cannabis as medicine in 2014.
Now after our years-long battle to give children like Austin lawful access to this medicine, to give other parents hope when there is none, Congress is poised to re-criminalize this plant and again put hundreds of thousands of patients, and the people that love them, in jeopardy.
Our lives before plant medicine were full of daily seizures, hospital stays, doctors, visits, tests, missed work, lost jobs and a chaos that comes with having a chronically/terminally ill child. For years, we thought that’s all we could ever have. We were very wrong. After moving to Colorado and beginning Austin’s medicine regimen, we saw incredible results—immediately. After his first dose, our son didn’t have a single seizure for three days.
We knew we had something. Austin had seized since he was a year old, regardless of which pharmaceutical or combination of several he was on. He was seizing every day, hundreds of times a day before. We knew this plant had something we hadn’t had access to before: cannabinoids.
From that day forward, for over a decade, Austin lived weeks, sometimes months, with no seizures at all. Our lives changed drastically, dramatically, for the better. Eight years without a single hospital stay, Austin was walking again, speaking again and saying, “I love you” to me and then giving me his beautiful smile. I never thought I would hear my son speak to me again. It was shocking. It was exhilarating. We had hope. A plant had given us hope; we were planning his life, not his death.
Now Congress is threatening to take that away—not just from my family, but from millions of Americans who depend on hemp-derived products for relief, wellness and survival.
The U.S. Senate passed an appropriations package containing hidden language that would effectively criminalize hemp-derived cannabinoids, including products that have been federally legal since the 2018 Farm Bill.
This language, slipped into a spending bill with no public debate, will crush a multi‑billion‑dollar lawful U.S. industry and will put hundreds of thousands of farmers, small businesses and workers at risk. Worse, it will leave hundreds of thousands of Americans without the legal access to their plant medicine. It would redefine “hemp” and cap total cannabinoids at trace levels per container, stripping legality from nearly all full-spectrum and hemp-derived products Americans rely on and have used lawfully for years.
This will, undoubtedly, push the market back underground, increasing black‑market sales and consumer risk, and loss of billions in tax revenue for numerous states.
This isn’t regulation—it’s re‑criminalization. And it undoes more than ten years of bipartisan progress, research, and real‑world success stories, like ours.
The hemp industry was built the right way: from farms and small businesses, through state oversight, science and compassion. It brought opportunity back to rural America and gave families like mine a fighting chance.
In 2016, we started the “Talk to the 6630507 Hand” campaign—sharing U.S. Patent 6,630,507, held by the Department of Health and Human Services, which acknowledges cannabinoids’ antioxidant and neuroprotective properties. Celebrities like Willie Nelson, Woody Harrelson and the creators of Broken Lizard joined in. The grassroots campaign ignited like wildfire. Millions of hands were shared on social media, with the same message: “6630507,” simply meaning that the plant is medicinal, science has proven it and the U.S. government knows it.
“The Time Is Now,” an Acreage Holdings PSA Super Bowl LIII commercial in 2019 that included Austin’s story, reached billions across the globe after the network declined to air it during the “big game.” We wanted other parents to know: there are alternatives, and there is hope. Austin lived a decade longer than doctors predicted—and lived better, happier—because of hemp and cannabis medicine. We would not have believed it, had we not lived it.
We worked for years with doctors, scientists, veterans and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle who agree: parents deserve access to any tool that might help their child. Veterans deserve to choose a plant over a pill. But here we are again, fighting for legal access to a plant that saved our son, despite the overwhelming scientific data to support and the millions across the country who say legal access to a plant is an American right.
If this Senate language becomes law, it will erase that hope—for us and for countless Americans.
Congress must act immediately to strip this harmful provision and ensure that hemp remains legal as intended under the Farm Bill. The future of an entire industry—and the health and hope of millions of Americans—depends on it.
This isn’t about politics. It’s about life.
And every mother knows: when it’s your child’s life on the line, you don’t take away the one thing that finally worked. How could you?
Amy Dawn Bourlon-Hilterbran is vice-chair of Moms Mobilized, co‑founder of American Medical Refugees and a long‑time advocate for legal hemp and cannabis access for families nationwide.
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