When Madison McDaniel was 11, he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called adrenocortical carcinoma. Various surgeries cost him his left adrenal gland, left kidney, appendix and a piece of his diaphragm. He also endured eight months of chemotherapy.

The young Madison seemed to be recovering, and he went back to playing Little League baseball. But the cancer metastasized to his brain when he was 13. He received several different types of radiation and had three brain surgeries. Though the cancer was beaten, the brain tumors and treatment left McDaniel with numbness and weakness on the right side of his body — as though he had suffered a stroke — and he lost vision in the right halves of both eyes.

At one point during his fight, he could say only two words, but years of physical, occupational and speech therapy made it possible for him to graduate from both high school and college. For awhile, Madison suffered from “simple-partial” seizures, his mother Pamela McDaniel says, but for a six-year period after high school graduation they stopped completely. While going to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Madison even held down a summer job with the Veterans Integrated Service Network in Durham.

The McDaniel family’s world turned upside down again in the fall of 2009 when he and his parents were involved in an automobile accident that, in effect, triggered something in Madison’s brain, leading to the reoccurrence of seizures. At their worst, Madison was having 115 seizures a month and, according to his mother, he still averages 60 a month.

As they said in a recent interview with the Post and at a hearing before the N.C. House Judiciary I Committee in Raleigh, Pamela and Mark McDaniel have tried all kinds of specialists, drugs, diets and supplements to address the seizures and give their son a better quality of life, but nothing has worked.

From their own research, the parents think medical marijuana might be an option, but as it stands now in North Carolina, marijuana in any form — medical or recreational — is illegal.

On the same day Pamela McDaniel testified before the House committee for passage of the Medical Cannabis Act, the committee members voted to kill the bill, apparently buying into arguments from conservative organizations that allowing medical marijuana will open the door to legalizing its recreational use and that emotional testimonies are no substitute for more rigorous scientific testing.

But the House committee acted too quickly and failed to give this important bill the consideration it deserves. There is science on the benefits of medical marijuana in treating physical and mental disorders. There are at least 23 states already allowing doctors to prescribe certain compounds derived from marijuana that do not make patients feel high. Rather, they have been shown to have anti-inflammatory, anti-pain, anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic benefits.

The McDaniels make it clear they aren’t advocating the recreational use of pot. They see it as a possible medical treatment for their  now 29-year-old son, who is suffering. It seems as though most N.C. legislators aren’t open-minded enough to even listen, and they’re the ones giving many people who could benefit from medical marijuana the treatment.