ILL BOY'S NEW HURDLE: SCHOOL DRUG RULES

Life just got more complicated for an 8-year-old boy and his mother who has
had great success battling his mental disorders with a doctor-approved
marijuana therapy. The youngster's medical condition has improved so
dramatically that he can now attend public school, but school officials
won't permit a school nurse to administer his cannabis capsules and won't
let him take the pills himself on campus, the child's mother said. "Other
kids get their medication," she complained. But the drug her son needs
daily at 1 p.m. must be delivered by her personally, off the school
grounds, she said. "It makes him feel he's not normal, that he's being
treated differently. He wonders why he's being targeted.

He just wants to be normal," she said. She hopes to persuade school
officials to change their minds and allow the capsules to be given on
campus. The woman, whose name is being withheld to protect the boy's
identity, has been treating her son with medical cannabis for the past
year, at home and at the private school he had been attending. But in
April, they moved.

She presented her son's new school with the required permission slip for
students who need medication at school, a form she and the boy's doctor
signed. The day before the boy was to report to his new school, however, a
message left on the family answering machine informed the mother that her
son's recommended medication could not be administered on campus. So, she
says, she's been forced to drive a round trip of 26 miles each noontime to
remove him from the school grounds, give him his capsules, and return him
to class. Vicki Barber, superintendent of the El Dorado County Office of
Education, said she state law permits schools to dispense drugs only when
they are formally "prescribed" by a physician.

The boy's doctor made a "recommendation," and there is a difference, Barber
added, between a "prescription" and a doctor's "recommendation." Because
the district has a zero-tolerance policy, students are not permitted to
have in their possession or to self-administer drugs of any kind, she said.