[Vision2020] Fwd: Special Forces vet's family featured in marijuana documentary

Wed Aug 21 06:21:59 PDT 2013

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 9:20 AM
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Special Forces vet's family featured in marijuana
documentary
To: Scott Dredge <scooterd408 at hotmail.com>

"Puritanism - The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy." --
H.L. Menchen

On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 3:28 AM, Scott Dredge <scooterd408 at hotmail.com>wrote:

> I think medical marijuana will eventually be legalized.  As long as the
> user is not 'enjoying' it while using, Conservatives shouldn't be so hung
> up about it.  They pretty much put it in the same category as sex and
> anyone using it for pleasurable recreation activity shalt be exposed,
> criticized, and punished.
>
> ------------------------------
> From: thansen at moscow.com
> Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 14:02:46 -0700
> To: vision2020 at moscow.com
> Subject: [Vision2020] Special Forces vet's family featured in marijuana
> documentary
>
> Courtesy of the Army Times.
>
> --------------------------------------
> Special Forces vet's family featured in marijuana documentary
> Former Special Forces Staff Sgt. Matt Figi is stepping front and center
> into the debate to legalize medical marijuana after appearing in a CNN
> documentary that focused on the plight of his little girl.
>
> After watching his daughter Charlotte fight a losing battle against a rare
> and violent form of epilepsy that wracked her with hundreds of grand mal
> seizures every month, Figi found hope in an online discovery while in
> Afghanistan that marijuana might help her.
>
> Not only did it help, the improvement was so immediate and so dramatic
> that Dr. Sanjay Gupta cites it as one of the reasons he has reversed a
> years-long opposition to medical marijuana and now fully supports
> prescriptive pot.
>
> “I have seen more patients like Charlotte first hand, spent time with them
> and come to the realization that it is irresponsible not to provide the
> best care we can as a medical community, care that could involve
> marijuana,” Gupta writes in an online op-ed piece<http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/08/health/gupta-changed-mind-marijuana/>
>  introducing CNN’s documentary, dubbed simply “Weed.”
>
> In 2009, Gupta wrote strongly against the medical use of marijuana in a
> piece for Time magazine.
>
> “We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in
> the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that,” Gupta says now.
>
> CNN’s chief medical correspondent says that not only is the potential for
> abuse of marijuana relatively low, but a growing body of evidence suggests
> it is an effective treatment for everything from post-traumatic stress
> disorder and Parkinson’s to multiple sclerosis and cancer.
>
> All Matt Figi knows is that the cannabis oil his wife, Paige, now feeds
> their 6-year-old daughter every day has saved their child’s life.
>
> “I still remember that call in Afghanistan after the first dose,” Figi
> tells OFFduty. “First it was a full hour with no seizures. That turned into
> a full day, then a full week. This was at a point when she was having 300
> seizures in a week. It was round-the-clock. If you do the math, that
> doesn’t leave any time for the body to recover.”
>
> Charlotte was just a few months old when her tiny body starting going into
> the violent convulsions. As the seizures became more and more frequent,
> doctors eventually diagnosed her with Dravet Syndrome, a severe form of
> epilepsy that attacks brain development.
>
> Within a few years, their little girl was in a wheelchair, no longer able
> to form words, drool running down the side of her face between the constant
> waves of convulsions.
>
> “We had tried every imaginable drug possible,” says Figi — at least 15 in
> all, “sometimes as many as four or five at the same time,” but Charlotte
> continued to slip away.
>
> Figi, stationed at Fort Carson, Colo., with the Army’s 10th Special Forces
> Group, was regularly being called away from training and deployments as his
> daughter’s life hung in the balance in what turned into a stream of
> emergency room resuscitations and intensive care unit vigils. Doctors told
> Matt and Paige Figi to prepare for their daughter’s death.
>
> Figi joined the Army in 2003, going directly into Special Forces. He first
> trained as an A-team engineer specialist and then, as he was promoted,
> transitioned into the intelligence field. Things got so bad with Charlotte
> that he decided to leave the Army in 2008, eventually landing a job as a
> contractor, racking up four stints apiece in Iraq and Afghanistan.
>
> Never giving up hope, Figi spent his off-duty time downrange scouring the
> Web from his room in Kandahar for new options to help his daughter. That’s
> when he found a video on YouTube about a boy in California with the same
> condition as Charlotte who had shown improvement after ingesting marijuana
> low in THC — the part that gets the user high — but rich in another
> compound called cannabidiol, or CBD for short.
>
> “I couldn’t have imagined something like this,” Figi says. “I was raised
> in a family that always said drugs were bad, just don’t do it.” Now he was
> persuading his wife to give their daughter pot.
>
> After a long search, Paige Figi found two doctors who were willing to sign
> a prescription for Charlotte, unprecedented for someone so young.
>
> Charlotte’s “been close to death so many times, she’s had so much brain
> damage from seizure activity and likely the pharmaceutical medication,” Dr.
> Margaret Gedde told CNN. “When you put the potential risks of the cannabis
> in context like that, it’s a very easy decision.”
>
> With the help of friends, Paige Figi found a local supplier who had the
> right variety of marijuana plants available and created the first homemade
> tincture of cannabis oil.
>
> More than a year later, his daughter continues to improve. “She’s a kid
> again,” Figi says. “She’s riding her bicycle. Her words are coming back.
> It’s amazing. I think her brain is actually repairing itself now.”
>
> A local nonprofit organization called Realm of Caring Foundation now
> provides the cannabis nearly free that the family needs to keep Charlotte
> healthy. Otherwise, Figi isn’t sure they’d be able afford it.
>
> It shouldn’t be this hard to get help, he says.
>
> “It’s just ludicrous that marijuana has retained this Schedule I
> classification. It just seems like an amazing plant to me. I think the
> pharmaceutical companies are terrified about what we’ll find that it can
> do.”
>
> Figi he says he knows personally of more than 200 seizure sufferers now
> finding relief through marijuana.
>
> “The majority of them are kids, some as young as 3 years old,” he says.
> “It’s taking off like wildfire. I expect by this time next year there will
> be more than a thousand.”
>
> As word of their success circulates, the family’s phone is ringing off the
> hook.
>
> “We’ve definitely opened up Pandora’s box with this documentary,” he says.
>
> Parents from across the country are calling for advice and more details.
>
> “One of the first things people ask is, ‘Is she getting high?’ No, because
> the THC levels are so low it doesn’t work that way.”
>
> Several military families have been among those calling for advice, some
> concerned about legal and security clearance implications.
>
> “All I can tell them is that it hasn’t been a problem for me,” says Figi,
> who retains his top secret clearance for his defense contracting job.
>
> He passes along the advice he’s gotten from military lawyers who have told
> him to make sure his wife is the one paying for and getting the marijuana.
> Military lawyers have told OFFduty that dependents are free to use
> marijuana, in states where it is legal, as long as the pot stays off
> military property.
>
> Figi says his family won’t be leaving Colorado anytime soon.
>
> “I can’t leave the state with my own daughter because the only medicine
> that helps her is still illegal in most of the country.”
>
> --------------------
>
> Matt and Paige Figi with children Charlotte, Max and Charlotte's twin
> sister, Chase.
>
> [image: bilde.jpeg]
>
> --------------------------------------
>
> Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .
>
> "Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
> http://www.MoscowCares.com
>
> Tom Hansen
> Moscow, Idaho
>
> "There's room at the top they are telling you still
> But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
> If you want to be like the folks on the hill."
>
> - John Lennon
>
>
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-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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