More than 3,000 new patients will soon have access to high-CBD strain Charlotte’s Web, nonprofit Realm of Caring told The Cannabist this week.
Realm of Caring administers Charlotte’s Web, one of the best-known CBD strains in America, and keeps tabs on a wait list that tops 12,000 qualifying people who want to see if the low-THC marijuana works for what ails them.
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The wait list is made up mostly of children suffering from epilepsy — 73.5 percent of whom are seeing a 50 percent (or greater) reduction in seizures, according to the organization and third-party doctors who collect the data independently.
“As a parent, the wait list is what bothers me the most,” said Heather Jackson, executive director of Realm of Caring. “I don’t lose sleep about much, except for the wait list. It feels really phenomenal to make a big dent in that list, for sure.”
How is Realm of Caring making such a big dent in its wait list, which adds more than 1,100 hopeful names per month? The group recently harvested its first-ever outdoor hemp crop in Yuma County — allowing them to grow more plants than in their greenhouses and warehouses — and their oil extractions are beating initial projections.
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“Because it’s being grown in a field,” Jackson said, “and we didn’t fully know what to expect — like maybe the wind would blow off the trichomes or something like that — we wanted to measure our expectations. But everything is coming in really good. The milligrams we’re extracting from each plant, they’re looking great.”
People are being served in the order they signed up on the wait list. Of the 73.5 percent benefiting from Charlotte’s Web, Realm of Caring says 13 percent of those patients are seizure free — including Jackson’s son Zaki, who celebrated his two-year anniversary of being completely seizure free in early October.
