Rylie Maedler and Rylie’s Law: How One Little Girl Changed Delaware and the Nation
A Seven-Year-Old With a Plan to Change Her State
Rylie Maedler was seven years old when she was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare and aggressive bone cancer. She was also experiencing debilitating seizures. She was in Delaware, a state that had no medical cannabis program, no access to CBD oil, and no legal pathway for a child in her situation to access something that might help her.
Her father, Josh Maedler, did what parents do when the system fails their children. He started pushing. He researched. He found the emerging evidence on CBD and pediatric seizure conditions. He learned about Charlotte Figi’s story in Colorado and what high-CBD hemp extract had done for her. And he decided that if Delaware would not provide access, he would change Delaware.
What followed was one of the most remarkable stories of citizen advocacy in the modern cannabis reform movement: a little girl with cancer who became a lobbyist, who walked the halls of the Delaware General Assembly, who looked her state legislators in the eye and asked them to help her, and who, in 2015, got them to say yes.
What Rylie Was Facing
Ewing’s sarcoma is a cancer that primarily affects children and young adults, occurring in bone or soft tissue. It is aggressive. Treatment is intensive, involving chemotherapy, radiation, and often surgery. The side effects of treatment are brutal even for adults. For a seven-year-old, they are devastating.
Rylie was also experiencing seizures in addition to her cancer diagnosis, compounding the medical complexity of her situation. She was using a high-CBD hemp extract obtained through sources outside Delaware, at considerable legal risk and personal difficulty for her family. She was not doing this to be defiant. She was doing it because her family believed it was making a difference, and that belief was the foundation of everything that followed.
The choice facing her family was the same one that faces thousands of families in states without compassionate access laws: break the law to help your child, or comply with the law and watch your child suffer. This is not a theoretical moral dilemma. It was Rylie’s family’s reality every day.
Going to the Legislature
Josh Maedler had no background in politics or advocacy. He was a father. He became an advocate because he had no other option.
He began contacting Delaware legislators. He brought data. He brought Rylie’s medical records. He brought the emerging research on CBD and pediatric conditions. And he brought Rylie herself. A child fighting cancer, asking her elected officials for access to something that was making her life livable.
Legislators who met with Rylie have described the experience in ways that are easy to understand. It is one thing to debate policy in the abstract. It is another to look at a seven-year-old with cancer and explain to her why the state will not allow her the access she is asking for. The policy argument did not change but the human reality of it became impossible to ignore.
Not everyone was initially receptive. Some legislators were genuinely concerned about setting precedent, about regulatory complexity of pediatric medical cannabis access. Those were legitimate policy concerns. But Rylie’s presence in the room made them impossible to shelter behind.
What Rylie’s Law Did
In 2015, Delaware Governor Jack Markell signed into law what became known as Rylie’s Law. The legislation authorized the medical use of hemp-derived CBD oil for children with debilitating medical conditions, specifically including seizure disorders and cancer.
Delaware became one of a small number of states to have enacted explicit pediatric CBD access legislation. The law was named for Rylie Maedler because she had been the most visible and most personally compelling face of the advocacy campaign that made it possible.
The law was not a comprehensive medical cannabis program. It was specifically focused on CBD access for children in medical need. That narrowness was intentional. It made the legislation easier to pass by limiting the scope of the policy change, and it served the immediate population of children who needed access most urgently.
For Rylie’s family, the passage of the law meant that they could help their daughter without fear of prosecution. It meant that other Delaware families in similar situations would have a legal pathway. It meant that the state had officially acknowledged what those families already knew: that CBD could make a meaningful difference in the lives of sick children, and that the law had an obligation to allow it.
Why Rylie’s Story Matters Beyond Delaware
The significance of Rylie’s Law extends well beyond one state’s legislation. It is part of a pattern that is essential to understand if you want to grasp how hemp and CBD came to be federally legal in 2018.
Charlotte Figi’s story in Colorado showed the country what CBD could do for a child with catastrophic epilepsy. Rylie Maedler’s story in Delaware showed the country what a family could do when they refused to accept that the law had to remain unchanged. These stories, and dozens more like them from other states and other families, created a political environment in which the 2018 Farm Bill became possible.
Every state that passed a pediatric CBD access law added another brick to the foundation of what became federal hemp legalization. Rylie Maedler and her father put one of those bricks in place. The building it supported is the industry in which Banner Harvest operates today.
What Rylie’s Story Means to Me
I have been in this work for forty years. I have lived through every phase of this plant’s legal and cultural history.
When I think about why this work matters, Rylie Maedler is part of the answer. Not because Banner Harvest was involved in her story. We were not. But because her story is one of the reasons the door is open at all.
The access that our customers have, the ability to buy a high-quality hemp CBD product without legal risk, the federal framework that allows us to ship to 48 states, the public conversation about CBD that makes it possible for someone in The Villages or central Illinois to walk into a store and ask an informed question, all of it has a history. Charlotte Figi is in that history. Rylie Maedler is in that history. Hundreds of families whose names I will never know are in that history.
Rylie survived. She grew up. She continued to advocate. A child who lobbied her state legislature became a young woman who understands exactly what the plant did for her and exactly what it took to make it available.
That is the story of hemp in America, told through one family in Delaware. It deserves to be told and remembered.
References: Delaware General Assembly — SB 222 — Rylie’s Law — Signed August 2015. | National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws — Delaware legislative history. | Armentano P, NORML. State-by-State CBD Legalization Timeline. 2018.
FDA DISCLAIMER: These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice.
