Updates to our Terms of Use

We are updating our Terms of Use. Please carefully review the updated Terms before proceeding to our website.

Login to CNS Plus Login to CasePortal
Friday, April 19, 2024
Courthouse News Service
Free Litigation Reports Find Judicial Opinions
Friday, April 19, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Virus Claims Girl Who Proved Benefits of Cannabis

A girl with a rare form of epilepsy whose recovery inspired the name of a medical marijuana oil that drew families of children with similar health problems to Colorado for treatment has died after being hospitalized and treated as a likely coronavirus patient, her mother said Wednesday. Charlotte Figi was 13.

/ April 9, 2020
In this photo provided by the French Army Thursday, April 2, 2020, medical staffs evacuate a patient infected with the Covid-19 virus, Wednesday April 1, 2020 at Orly airport, south of Paris. The operation aims at relieving hospitals in the Paris region, hardly hit by the coronavirus. The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people, but for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death. (Julien Fechter/DICOD via AP)

DENVER (AP) — A girl with a rare form of epilepsy whose recovery inspired the name of a medical marijuana oil that drew families of children with similar health problems to Colorado for treatment has died after being hospitalized and treated as a likely coronavirus patient, her mother said Wednesday. Charlotte Figi was 13.

Charlotte, who lived in Colorado Springs, died Tuesday after suffering a seizure that resulted in cardiac arrest and respiratory failure, her mother, Paige Figi, said in a statement. Charlotte tested negative for the coronavirus when she was initially admitted to a hospital on Friday but was still treated as a likely Covid-19 case when she was returned to the hospital Tuesday after the seizure because her whole family had been sick for a month with suspected coronavirus symptoms, Figi said.

FILE - In this Feb. 7, 2014 photo, 7-year-old Charlotte Figi, whose parent describe her as once being severely and untreatably ill, walks around inside a greenhouse for a special strain of medical marijuana known as Charlotte's Web, which was named after Charlotte early in her treatment, at a grow location in a remote spot in the mountains west of Colorado Springs, Colo. Figi, the Colorado girl with a rare form of epilepsy whose recovery inspired the name of a medical marijuana oil that drew families to the state has died. The non-profit organization co-founded by her mother says Charlotte, now 13, Figi died Tuesday, April 7, 2020. It didn't say how she died. A post on her mother's Facebook page said she was recently hospitalized and a virus had infected her whole family. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File)

Her death was announced by the group cofounded by Paige Figi, Realm of Caring Foundation, to help other families who uprooted their lives for a chance to use cannabis to treat their children's seizures before marijuana became more widely legalized in the United States.

Charlotte's case and the advocacy of her parents played a significant role in drawing attention to the potential that a drug derived from cannabis could be used to treat epilepsy.

"Some journeys are long and bland and others are short and poignant and meant to revolutionize the world. Such was the path chosen by this little girl with a catastrophic form of epilepsy called Dravet Syndrome," the statement said.

At age 5, Charlotte suffered as many as 300 grand mal seizures a week, used a wheelchair, went into repeated cardiac arrest and could barely speak.

With doctors out of ideas, Paige Figi began calling medical marijuana shops. Her symptoms largely disappeared after she began taking an oil created using a strain of marijuana with low THC, the drug's psychoactive compound, but high in the chemical CBD, created by Stanley Brothers, a marijuana business in Colorado. It later named it after her.

Federal prohibition of marijuana has limited research into marijuana and its compounds’ health effects, but Charlotte's family and hundreds of others shared their own experience using it for seizure disorders.

U.S. health regulators in 2018 approved the first prescription drug made with CBD to treat rare forms of epilepsy in young children.

In an online tribute, Stanley Brothers praised Charlotte as "a light that lit the world."

"She grew, cultivated by a community, protected by love, demanding that the world witness her suffering so that they might find a solution," it said.

Categories / Health, Law, National, Science

Subscribe to Closing Arguments

Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.

Additional Reads

Loading...