Oregon Mom Treated Teen Daughter’s Liver Cancer with CBD Oil, Gets 90 Days in Jail

Christina Dixon fled Oregon with her teenage daughter to avoid her having surgery to treat liver cancer in 2019

An Oregon mother was sentenced to three months in jail and supervised probation for trying to keep her daughter from receiving surgery in 2019 to treat her liver cancer and instead attempting to treat the disease with CBD oil and vitamins.

Local station WLBT reports that the mother, 39-year-old Christina Dixon, became emotional on Monday when she received her sentence, which prosecutors believed to be too lenient.

According to The Oregonian, prosecutors originally sought a 19-month sentence against the mother for trying to keep her then-13-year-old daughter from receiving the recommended medical attention for her cancer diagnosis.

“The reason that [she] is alive today is because she got the chemotherapy, because she got surgery, because of tumors removed,” Deputy District Attorney Brian Powell told a judge at the sentencing hearing Monday.

But Circuit Judge Michael Wetzel opted to hand down a more lenient 90-day sentencing because Dixon’s daughter, now 17 years old, has continued to support her mother, according to WLBT.

The daughter was not at the court hearing, but the teen’s father Jim Dixon was and said he was disappointed in the lax sentencing. “I’m glad there’s closure, finally,” he said, according to the outlet. “I was a little sad to see how easy she got off on all this considering all the damage she’s done.”

The teen was first diagnosed with cancer in 2018, according to The Oregonian. She underwent three rounds of chemotherapy before her mother began refusing to take her daughter to receive treatments. The newspaper reports that the state’s Department of Human Services then got involved and claimed custody of the girl, allowing the state to make medical decisions for her, while continuing to allow her to live with her mother.

Dixon then fled the state with the teen hours before her daughter was scheduled to have surgery in June 2019, taking her to Las Vegas. Police located the teen and returned her to Oregon, where she received successful surgery in 2020.

“I never wanted to stop her treatment,” DIxon told the court, according to WLBT. “It was just with this particular doctor. I would’ve never put [her] in harm’s way. I did everything to fight for her life, and I put my own life on the line for her.”

Greg Oliveros, Dixon’s lawyer, told the court this week that the mother “made some mistakes” but argued that “one could argue her love for her child clouded her common sense or judgment,” according to The Oregonian.

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The daughter is now cancer free, according to her father, although the newspaper reports he hasn’t seen his daughter since 2020.

“The truth is that [she] had a tumor that CBD wasn’t doing a thing to help,” her father told WLBT. “The only thing that was helping was the treatment that she was getting, and she had the surgery. And she’s cancer free now because of it.”

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