NEWS RANT The Goverment should grant Alfie's parents wishes and an update to my Oxfam rant.

OK so I am back News Ranting again

So the Home Office have denied a family's plea for there six year old boy to be given medical cannabis. So Six year old Alfie Dingley, from Kenilworth in Warwickshire, suffers up to 30 violent epileptic seizures a day. You might wonder why I am talking about this and well one of the key reasons is that I am an epileptic myself. For those of you who are not epileptics I am not going to get massively technical here but just let me tell you that having a fit sucks. You suffer not only from the fit, but from the injuries you take while falling the pain you feel in your head after, the disorientation and headaches after, its not the same for everyone but its certainly not happy happy fun time.

Anyways Alfie was taken to the Netherlands to take a cannabis-based medication in September. While he was there he was prescribed cannabis oil by a pediatric neurologist, and this saw his seizures reduce dramatically in both number, duration and severity.At one point while in the UK, Alfie had 3,000 seizures and 48 hospital visits in a year, but while abroad he went 24 days without a single attack. When you are having fits every day or practically every day when you are feeling ill because of this almost constantly you get to the point where you are just so sick of being ill, where you would look for anything to help, would do anything to help. It is hard to be a sufferer of epilepsy but as someone who had it from around the age of 6 I can tell you I think it is even harder for someones parents. Alfie's mum knows how much he suffers and knows that something could help her little boy to be happier and live a better life and yet here the home office is telling her he cant have it.

The Home Office when asked about this said that the drug "cannot be practically prescribed, administered or supplied to the public". They also added that it can only be used for research. I know some people will just say its the law and expect this to be answer enough but its about time we cut the crap here. The UK is absolutely full of drugs, Cannabis is pretty much everywhere, the police are fighting this war on drugs and they are absolutely losing. We can not hold Cannabis down, we can not stop drug dealers from making huge wads of money on it, so lets screw it all and just legalize it. Lets make it legal and tax it and actually make an on the books profit from it so the money goes somewhere decent and helps the country but more importantly so that little Alfie can get the few drops of Cannabis oil he needs a day so that he doesn't have to needlessly suffer. I think its about time we came up with a way to make other people feel our illnesses even just for a second as no one should have to tell Alfie's parents that he is not allowed the medication he needs to make his life better without having to first walk a day in Alfie's shoes without having to feel what he feels and struggle the way he struggles. All I can say to end this is that I hope things get better for Alfie somehow.

OK I also feel I need to do a quick update on my Oxfam Rant. I commented that I didn't care about the whole prostitution thing and that if people wanted to pay for that as long as it was out of there own money and not the charities money then I simply didn't care. Well it seems that what was first announced was the tip of the iceberg. If I had known more at the time then I would have said more. I have thought about revisiting this topic several times over the last few days but the story has just never stopped growing but now seemed as good a time as any to do a quick catch up.

Since I last wrote about the situation all sorts has been said there have been allegations that there were big parties thrown with prostitutes, where girls were wearing Oxfam T-shirts, running around half-naked, full on orgies, that some of the sex workers were between 14 and 16 years old and therefore below the age of consent. There were other allegations of things such as bullying, intimidation, harassment and the use of 'pornographic and illegal material' on work computers the story just seemed to grow and grow without an end. The government said they were going to look into Oxfams funding, one of there celebrity ambassadors stepped down many people stopped donating to them.

Now I don't want to go into massive depth about all of this but I just want to say that... Yes bad things have happened in regard to Oxfam if you want to you can read up on them in far more detail on various news sites as I don't want to do a massive in depth piece on it, but what I do want to say is that some people have been shockingly quick to stick the boot into Oxfam in general. Now stop and think about it Oxfam is huge and many many people work for them, they have lots of volunteers working in shops doing there best to help the cause while also gaining some experience for themselves, yes some people have done wrong in one way or another but lets not tar everyone with the same brush. Yes I condemn anyone who has generally been a dick but lets not be a dick about those who have been doing nothing but good.

Well thats it for now join me for more News Rant basically the next time something in the news causes me to want to moan and go on a bit.