Charlotte’s Web: weed or medical miracle?

"..What they’re hoping to do is recreate the success story of Charlotte Figi, the child whose parents were able to find a CBD-rich, low THC cannabis strain to treat their daughter’s intractable seizures"

Charlotte’s Web: weed or medical miracle?

Hit Google and search news stories on cannabis for seizures, and what do you get? Story after story of desperate parents with chronically ill children seeking access to cannabis. But are they really planning to make their children high? Chances are, they aren’t going to do anything of the kind. What they’re hoping to do is recreate the success story of Charlotte Figi, the child whose parents were able to find a CBD-rich, low THC cannabis strain to treat their daughter’s intractable seizures.

To understand this better, we need a little background info. CBD doesn’t make you high. THC does make you high. Both compounds are cannabinoids found in abundance in cannabis plants. The marijuana contemptuously referred to as “weed” and Charlotte’s Webs” are worlds apart. If we were to think of a plant as a vessel, like a jug, that has only so much capacity to hold a substance, the distinction becomes clearer.

Cannabis users seek out high THC strains to get – well – high. Because most of the room in the plant is taken up by THC, there isn’t space for much CBD. When CBD is high (and not you), the plant doesn’t have much space to hold THC.

Charlotte’s Web “weed” becomes pharmaceutical wonder

A lot of people mistakenly see “Charlotte’s Web” as being a “new” development, but in truth, it’s a return to cannabis’ roots. Back in the day, most weed contained a lot of CBD, but users didn’t like it. It actually makes the THC less likely to fog the mind. Foggy minds are what recreational users seek, so breeding out the CBD made sense. As a result, we now have strains like  the “skunk” which have an high amount of THC. But now, people are rediscovering CBD – regretfully, it’s pretty hard to find high-CBD strains in the States.

Now pharma has had a try at declaring CBD to be a “new” drug, but there’s ample proof that it has been used within whole plant extracts as a medicine for thousands of years, even though the actual compound was only identified in the last century.

Currently, a pharmaceutical is undergoing stage 3 trials with the blessing of the FDA to determine how effective a CBD-based medicine could be in limiting intractable epileptic fits. But there are those who believe that no single isolate will ever be as effective as a whole plant extract which contains hundreds of complimentary molecules that may work together in producing the desired effect.

Many other benefits suspected

Charlotte’s web weed is suspected to have many additional benefits, and because of its apparent lack of any serious side-effects it is currently being tested scientifically to determine whether the old wisdom of herbalists can be used in evidence-based medicine.