Charlotte Figi suffered her first seizure when she was three months old and on Wednesday, her mother Paige Figi’s Facebook page updated a previous post to announce Charlotte “is seizure free forever.” The 13-year-old was hospitalized earlier this month with pneumonia, which caused her seizures to return and resulted in respiratory failure and cardiac arrest. She died peacefully in her mother’s arms on April 8, 2020.

Diagnosed with Dravet syndrome, a rare form of epilepsy that begins in infancy, her parents turned to medical marijuana as a last resort to help their daughter and started researching cannabidiol, or CBD.In 2012, they met a group of brothers in Colorado who were breeding a special strain of medical cannabis that later became classified as hemp because of its high CBD, low THC content. Using the oil extract from fully grown plants, Charlotte, then five, went from having a seizure every 30 minutes to not having one for seven days after starting the treatment. 

In 2014, the Stanley brothers founded a namesake company, Charlotte’s Web CBD, in her honor. But CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, from whom most of the country first heard the term CBD, who introduced us to Charlotte.