In spite of the fact that it’s been legalized pretty much everywhere around the globe, cannabis still gets a lot of dirt from the media. There are stories about “addicted” dopeheads and marijuana as if it was no better than heroin.
You don’t hear too many positive stories about this plant on the news and moreover, all testimonies about the potential of medical weed are branded as fairytales and ramblings. Luckily, we know none of that is true.
Weed is a medicine and it has been used as such for thousands of years. Today we’re going to speak about a 6-year old girl from Colorado that was given weed for her condition and has lived a normal life since then.
The Story of Charlotte Figi
There are numerous forms of epilepsy. Some of them are mild, others are aggressive and marring. Charlotte had suffered from Dravet syndrome, a quite rare form of epilepsy, since she was a baby. Her seizures were primarily activated by fever.
As she grew up, she came to have hundreds of seizures per week. The Dravet syndrome, unlike other forms of epilepsy, does not get any better with age. Apart from seizures, it also causes a wide variety of other symptoms: a poor development of motor skills and the ability to speak, hyperactivity, cognitive impairment, and insomnia or excessive somnolence.
Due to the severity of her condition, Charlotte was not able to walk and talk properly. She could not take hot baths because those would just cause a chain-reaction of seizures.
Doctors could not do much for her. When medical weed was legalized in the state of California, her mother, Paige, took a stab in the dark and gave Charlotte cannabis oil for the very first time. She diluted it with some olive oil.
The results, according to Paige, were almost instantaneous. In just one week, Charlotte did not need any medication. She was able to get out of the wheelchair she had been confined to for years. She could eat on her own and instead of having approximately 300 seizures per week, she came down to 3 or 4.
“It is beyond my comprehension that any humane person would withhold such a beneficial substance from people in such great need simply because others use it for different purposes.”
Steven Gould
She was also giving signs of autism, undoubtedly caused by the Dravet syndrome, but those went away as well when she was administered medical cannabis. Thanks to the awful “drug” marijuana, she now lives a normal life, like every child should.
Final Thoughts
The thing with medical cannabis is that a lot of people are against it until they need it themselves. Luckily, there are moving stories like this that can make even the most skeptic people believe in the potency and harmlessness of this amazing plant that is a solution to so many problems.
There are tens of other similar testimonies, for a wide variety of conditions. You just need to approach them with a clear mind, not with one that is full of misconceptions. We hope that it won’t be long until everybody will realize how important cannabis really is and that it should not be banned, but mandatory for certain conditions.
