i said just don t touch that because we need that plant. at first they didn t want to take the risk of giving marijuana to such a young child. but then they met her. tell me about the first time you met matt, paige, and charlotte. hmm. i m going to get you misty-eyed. yeah, you get all of us crying when we start talking about that little girl. the figges had hit the jackpot, a steady supply of high-cbd marijuana, and they only had to pay what they could afford. people have called us the robin hoods of marijuana. they say we sell pot so we can take care of the kids, and the truly less fortunate. charlotte was the first of those kids. late spring 2012 she tried the stanley special marijuana, and again it worked. i can t tell you what that means to us. gets you, doesn t it, a little bit?
joyful little girl. she started to really decline, cognitively. and she was slipping away. and she just wasn t keeping up with her twin. they finally found an answer, and it was awful news. gervais syndrome. it is severe intractable epilepsy. the seizures start during the first year of life and are unstoppable, difficult to control, and very damaging. severe behavioral problems. attention deficit and hyperactivity. the self injury, banging her head on the floor and pulling her hair out. like a possessed child. this isn t your happy charlotte. it was a race against time. many gervais kids die young, in early childhood. charlotte was almost 3. for the next two years, the figges tried everything. strange diets, acupuncture, and dozens of powerful drugs like valium, ativan, phenobarbital, but nothing seemed to help. even worse, some of the medications nearly killed her.
medicine. there was no protocol. when we come back, what will the figges do? and what would you do if this were your daughter? hi i m heather cox on location with the famous, big idaho potato truck. our truck? it s touring across america telling people about idaho potatoes. farmer: let s go boy. again this year the big idaho potato truck is traveling the country spreading the word about heart healthy idaho potatoes and making donations to local charities. excuse me miss, have you seen our truck? you just missed it. ahhh! aw man are you kiddin me? is she allergic?
main ingredients, thc that s the psychoactive part that makes you high, and cbd, also called cannabidiol. they think it regulates electric activity to help quiet the activity in the brain that causes the seizures. dr. julie holland is the editor of the pot book, a complete guide to cannabis. for a long time the work on cannabis and epilepsy was sort of inconclusive. maybe it works. maybe it doesn t. they couldn t quite figure it out. it s only when they really started separating thc from cbd that they saw definitively, yes, cbd seems to really stop seizures. so the figges needed to find something that was rare, a strain of marijuana that was low in thc. of course, they didn t want charlotte getting stoned. but also high in cbd to treat her seizures. and that wouldn t be easy. dispensaries and growers, they make their money off strains that are high in thc. i m joel. i m josh.
he got the message out through news reports. and then came this curing the insane. refer madness, portraying it as unproductive, crazed. people are still afraid of what pot can do to them. in many ways, defining our attitudes for 70 years. marijuana became illegal in 1937. by 1970, it was a schedule one controlled substances. the government was saying it had no medicinal value, and had a high potential for abuse. all reasons why the figges stayed away from marijuana, until this. and this might be hard for some of you to watch. it s okay, baby. this is their daughter charlotte having a seizure. we just thought it was just one random febrile seizure.