Mykayla Comstock’s family says marijuana helps her fight an especially aggressive form of leukemia, keeps infection at bay and lifts her weary spirit. Twice a day she swallows a potent capsule form of the drug. Some days, when she can’t sleep or eat, she snacks on a gingersnap or brownie baked with marijuana-laced butter.

Mykayla is one of 2,201 cancer patients authorized by the state of Oregon to use medical marijuana.

She is 7.

The Oregon Medical Marijuana Program serves 52 children who have a qualifying medical condition, parental consent and a doctor’s approval. Like adults, most cite pain as a qualifying condition, though many list multiple health problems, including seizures, nausea and cancer.

Allowing adults to consume medical marijuana is gaining acceptance nationwide. But Mykayla’s story underscores the complex issues that arise when states empower parents to administer the controversial drug to children.

Oregon’s law, approved by voters 14 years ago, requires no monitoring of a child’s medical marijuana use by a pediatrician. The law instead invests authority in parents to decide the dosage, frequency and manner of a child’s marijuana consumption.

The state imposes no standards for quality, safety or potency in the production of marijuana.

Little is known about how the drug interacts with the developing body, leading pediatricians say. A recent international study found sustained cannabis use among teens can cause long-term damage to intellect, memory and attention.

Many doctors worry about introducing a child to marijuana when they say other drugs can treat pain and nausea more effectively.

Mykayla’s father, who is divorced from the girl’s mother, was so disturbed by his daughter’s marijuana use that he contacted child welfare officials, police and her oncologist. Jesse Comstock said his concerns were prompted by a visit with Mykayla in August.

“She was stoned out of her mind,” said Comstock, 26. “All she wanted to do was lay on the bed and play video games.”

But Mykayla’s mother and her boyfriend, Erin Purchase and Brandon Krenzler, see the drug as a harmless antidote to leukemia’s host of horrors. The couple, regular cannabis users raised in Pendleton, said Mykayla relies almost exclusively on pot to treat pain, nausea, vomiting, depression and sleep problems associated with her cancer treatment.

Mykayla, who favors a knit cupcake cap to cover her fuzz of strawberry-colored hair, said marijuana makes her feel better.

“It helps me eat and sleep,” she said, nestled against her mother on a couch. “The chemotherapy makes you feel like you want to stay up all night long.”

Marijuana, she said, “makes me feel funny, happy.”

“She’s like she was before,” her mother said. “She’s a normal kid.”

Diagnosis: leukemia

Mykayla, a sweet girl with a splash of red freckles across her nose and cheeks, started showing cancer symptoms last spring. She was feverish. She had a hacking cough and night sweats. A rash spread on her leg.

Purchase, 25, worried that her daughter had Lyme disease or pneumonia. A Pendleton doctor suspected strep throat and put her on antibiotics. 

But Mykayla’s health worsened. Purchase took her to a Hermiston pediatrician, who found a mass in the girl’s chest.

Purchase and Krenzler, 27, drove Mykayla to Randall Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel that afternoon. The following day she was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

“My whole life is her,” said Purchase, who became pregnant with Mykayla when she was a 17-year-old high school senior. “I was so scared of losing her. It was heartbreaking.”

Leukemia is the most common childhood cancer, striking an estimated 3,800 American children each year. Mykayla has T-cell leukemia, an aggressive form of the disease that affects 10 to 15 percent of patients.

Immediately, Purchase, who is divorced from Mykayla’s father and has sole custody, faced decisions about her daughter’s treatment.

With chemotherapy, doctors put Mykayla’s odds of survival at 76.9 percent and her chance of relapse at 7 percent, Purchase said. Purchase accepted the chemo as part of her daughter’s treatment, although she takes a generally dim view of the pharmaceutical industry, is skeptical of childhood vaccines, rejects genetically modified foods and avoids products made with high-fructose corn syrup.

What Purchase believes, emphatically, is that cannabis heals.

Purchase said her stepfather’s topical application of cannabis oil cured his skin cancer. She said an acquaintance’s lung cancer went into remission after he used pot.

And Purchase herself consumes marijuana daily.

She said she became an Oregon medical marijuana patient in 2010 to treat vomiting from a metabolic problem and from her pregnancy with her second child. She is so convinced of the drug’s safety that she consumed it during the pregnancy and while breastfeeding.