Forrest Hurd worked with children in pediatric mental health for 15 years before having to leave his career to care for his son full time in 2014. Forrest’s son, Silas, has a rare, catastrophic form of epilepsy called Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome that at the time was causing over 2,500 seizures a month.
Forrest has spent the last several years studying cannabis-medicine science with some of the top researchers in the county in an effort to save his own sons life. When conventional CBD approaches failed to provide even a single day seizure free, Forrest began creating custom medicines and was eventually able to decrease his son’s seizures by over 99%. This process exposed not only how a lack of community understanding can harm families but also how the general understanding of cannabis medicine in the industry was not quite equipped to deal with rare catastrophic illness. Forrest went on to become a medical-cannabis-family advocate working to educate communities about the harms of restrictive cannabis laws that put medically fragile and catastrophically ill children’s lives at risk as well as advise cannabis companies on how to meet the needs of patients without unintentionally causing harm.
In 2015 he founded the charity organization, the Caladrius Network, a non-profit children and families organization whose mission is to improve the quality of life of catastrophically ill children by providing educational services and cannabis-supplements at absolutely no cost to the families, ever. Forrest, along with the California Compassion Coalition, is now working with legislators to pass legislation in 2018 that will revolutionize how the cannabis industry provides medicine to the terminally ill and helping bring attention to these issues as a speaker at events like the Emerald Cup as well as testifying before the senate and assembly as an expert on medical cannabis and compassion program needs.
2018 Convergence Workshop: Restoring Cannabis Therapies for Access and Holistic Healthcare.
