WARNER ROBINS, Ga. — Each day about lunchtime at Warner Robins High School, 17-year-old CJ Harris must leave campus to take his medicine.
His dad, Curtis Harris, drives to school, gets CJ out of class, and the two ride around the block or sometimes head home. CJ draws some cannabis oil in a syringe, squirts it under his tongue and waits for it to dissolve.
He’s been taking the medicine every six hours for the past four months for epilepsy.
“I haven’t had a seizure since,” the high school football player said.
The oil, derived from the cannabis plant, wasn’t a problem for administrators at First Presbyterian Day School, a private school in Macon. But the rules are different at public schools, the Harrises learned during a recent transfer process to Houston County.
“I told them about it, you know, ‘He takes (the) oil for his seizures … , and that’s when they went into a panic, like, ‘We don’t know what to do about this,'” Curtis Harris said of Houston County school officials. “They called the head state nurse, and the head state nurse told him that he can’t even have it on campus.”
CJ is the first medical marijuana patient at a Houston County school since state Rep. Allen Peake of Macon introduced a law in 2015 that established a state medical marijuana registry that is limited to people with specific diseases.
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