You can look at almost any cannabis strain description online, and there’s bound to be the word “historic” in there somewhere. With tins of cannabis hybrids that have significantly impacted the field, few strains exist that have had tremendous effect outside of the marijuana community. Charlotte’s Web is one hemp hybrid that certainly deserves the tag of “historic”.
Charlotte’s Web was not just among the first CBD-rich strains to hit the legal cannabis market, but even went on to help in medicinal CBD products’ mainstream adoption. If not for this hybrid, the farm Bill of 2018 might not have been passed.
It doesn’t do justice to this strain without first looking at Charlotte Figi, who was born in 2006 and began having seizures early in life. The diagnosis by doctors was Dravet syndrome, which was the cause of hundreds of seizures each week.
Traditional medications were little to no use, so her parents started looking into alternative treatment, such as medicinal marijuana. They eventually began including CBD-rich oil into her diet, and just a few days into this change, started seeing a significant drop in the number of seizures.
This led to contacting Stanley Brothers, a hemp company, who had already developed a new high-CBD strain in 2011. After meeting Charlotte Figi, they decided to rename the strain as “Charlotte’s Web”.
Soon after this, the hemp strain took off on mainstream media, with major news outlets and publications running stories on Figi’s experiences. By 2013, Stanley Brothers had seen a massive hike in demand where their high-CBD products were concerned, with more and more companies starting to notice.
With the immense media attention, there began a mass adoption of CBD supplements, and universities in 2014 were given permission to study CBD hemp. DC even allowed selling and manufacturing CBD goods by 2018. The FDA started taking this therapy method more seriously, and then the Farm Bill passed in 2018, approving Epidiolex for childhood epilepsy.
