Girls' Journey Renews Fears Of Terror Recruiting

The apartment complex in Aurora, Colo., which police say is the home of one of the three teenage girls who, according to U.S. authorities, were en route to join the Islamic State group in Syria...

Mia Bloom, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, said the girls' story so far suggests how Islamic extremists have mastered social media to prey on younger and younger women with "Disney-like versions" of what it is like to live under Muslim leadership, complete with promises of husbands and homes.

At least one of the girls was communicating with someone online who encouraged the three to travel to Syria, said Tustin Amole, a spokeswoman for the Cherry Creek School District where the girls attend high school.

Fellow students told school officials that the girls had been discussing travel plans over Twitter, Amole said. The girls were detained at an airport in Frankfurt, Germany, and sent home over the weekend. They were interviewed by the FBI and returned to their parents in the Denver suburb of Aurora. Those in the tight-knit east African community where they live said the sisters are of Somali descent and their friend is of Sudanese descent.

"There's no indication they had been radicalized in a way that they wanted to fight for ISIS," Amole said. A U.S. official said evidence gathered so far made it clear that the girls were headed to Syria, though the official said investigators were still trying to determine what sort of contacts they had in that country. Another U.S. official said investigators were reviewing evidence, including the girls' computers. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation by name.

"Social media has played a very significant role in the recruitment of young people," said FBI spokesman Kyle Loven in Minneapolis, home to the largest Somali community in the U.S. Authorities there have been concerned about terror recruiting of the young for years.

"What we've experienced here in Minneapolis is that young, disaffected youth who exist primarily on the fringes of society — they seem to be more susceptible to this type of propaganda, unfortunately," Loven said.

Terror recruiting has been a problem for years in Minneapolis. Since 2007, roughly 22 young Somali-Americans have traveled to Somalia to take up arms with al-Shabab, an al-Qaida-linked group. Those were all men.

Within the last year, a handful of people from the community left Minnesota to join militant groups in Syria, and this time, there are fears that women might have been targeted. Loven said the FBI is working with the Somali community to establish trust and help identify young people at risk for radicalization.

In Colorado, Amole said the three teens had no prior problems at school, aside from unexcused absences on Friday. What is still unknown is how they managed to get to Germany. The U.S. government doesn't have restrictions on children flying alone, domestically or internationally. Airline policies vary. Most U.S. airlines allow children 12 and older to fly alone but often with restrictions on international flights, according to the U.S. Transportation Department.

The girls' parents reported them missing Friday after they skipped school. They had taken passports and $2,000 in cash from the home of the sisters' parents. At some point, the U.S. informed German authorities at the airport about the girls arriving alone on their way to Turkey, German Interior Ministry spokeswoman Pamela Mueller-Niese told reporters Wednesday. She said the three were detained by German police, with approval from a judge, and returned voluntarily to the U.S. on Sunday.

Once home, the girls told a deputy they went to Germany for "family" but wouldn't elaborate. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Denver would not say whether prosecutors plan to charge the girls with a crime. State prosecutors said they have no imminent plans to charge the girls. Amole said they will not face school discipline.

"Our biggest concern is for the safety and well-being of these girls," Amole said.

Associated Press writers Amy Forliti in Minneapolis, David Rising and Geir Moulson in Berlin, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.

Kids With Seizures Use Pot As Treatment

Aileen Burger holds up a bottle of cannabis-infused oil used as medicine for her 4-year-old daughter Elizabeth, who suffers from severe epilepsy and is receiving the experimental treatment with a special strain of medical marijuana, at her home in Colorado Springs, Colo. After years of nearly losing their daughter while trying and failing with dozens of mainstream treatments, Elizabeth's parents moved from the east coast to Colorado, where they say they have had luck with Charlotte's Web, a proprietary strain of marijuana in which the psychoactive THC has been largely bred out, and the other cannabinoid compounds thought to be medically useful accentuated.

COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO. (ASSOCIATED PRESS) — The doctors were out of ideas to help 5-year-old Charlotte Figi.

Suffering from a rare genetic disorder, she had as many as 300 grand mal seizures a week, used a wheelchair, went into repeated cardiac arrest and could barely speak. As a last resort, her mother began calling medical marijuana shops.

Two years later, Charlotte is largely seizure-free and able to walk, talk and feed herself after taking oil infused with a special pot strain. Her recovery has inspired both a name for the strain of marijuana she takes that is bred not to make users high — Charlotte's Web — and an influx of families with seizure-stricken children to Colorado from states that ban the drug.

"She can walk, talk; she ate chili in the car," her mother, Paige Figi, said as her dark-haired daughter strolled through a cavernous greenhouse full of marijuana plants that will later be broken down into their anti-seizure components and mixed with olive oil so patients can consume them. "So I'll fight for whomever wants this."

Doctors warn there is no proof that Charlotte's Web is effective, or even safe. In the frenzy to find the drug, there have been reports of non-authorized suppliers offering bogus strains of Charlotte's Web. In one case, a doctor said, parents were told they could replicate the strain by cooking marijuana in butter. Their child went into heavy seizures.

"We don't have any peer-reviewed, published literature to support it," Dr. Larry Wolk, the state health department's chief medical officer, said of Charlotte's Web. Still, more than 100 families have relocated since Charlotte's story first began spreading last summer, according to Figi and her husband. The relocated families have formed a close-knit group in Colorado Springs, the law-and-order town where the dispensary selling the drug is located. They meet for lunch, support sessions and hikes.

"It's the most hope lots of us have ever had," said Holli Brown, whose 9-year-old daughter, Sydni, began speaking in sentences and laughing since moving to Colorado from Kansas City and taking the marijuana strain.

Amy Brooks-Kayal, vice president of the American Epilepsy Society, warned that a few miraculous stories may not mean anything — epileptic seizures come and go for no apparent reason — and scientists do not know what sort of damage Charlotte's Web could be doing to young brains.

"Until we have that information, as physicians, we can't follow our first creed, which is do no harm," she said, suggesting that parents relocate so their children can get treated at one of the nation's 28 top-tier pediatric epilepsy centers rather than move to Colorado.

However, the society urges more study of pot's possibilities. The families using Charlotte's Web, as well as the brothers who grow it, say they want the drug rigorously tested, and their efforts to ensure its purity have won them praise from skeptics like Wolk.

For many, Charlotte's story was something they couldn't ignore. Charlotte is a twin, but her sister, Chase, doesn't have Dravet's syndrome, which kills kids before they reach adulthood. In early 2012, it seemed Charlotte would be added to that grim roster. Her vital signs flat-lined three times, leading her parents to begin preparing for her death. They even signed an order for doctors not to take heroic measures to save her life again should she go into cardiac arrest.
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Her father, Matt, a former Green Beret who took a job as a contractor working in Afghanistan, started looking online for ways to help his daughter and thought they should give pot a try. But there was a danger: Marijuana's psychoactive ingredient, THC, can trigger seizures.

The drug also contains another chemical known as CBD that may have seizure-fighting properties. In October, the Food and Drug Administration approved testing a British pharmaceutical firm's marijuana-derived drug that is CBD-based and has all its THC removed.

Few dispensaries stock CBD-heavy weed that doesn't get you high. Then Paige Figi found Joel Stanley. One of 11 siblings raised by a single mother and their grandmother in Oklahoma, Stanley and four of his brothers had found themselves in the medical marijuana business after moving to Colorado. Almost as an experiment, they bred a low-THC, high-CBD plant after hearing it could fight tumors.

Stanley went to the Figis' house with reservations about giving pot to a child. "But she had done her homework," Stanley said of Paige Figi. "She wasn't a pot activist or a hippy, just a conservative mom."

Now, Stanley and his brothers provide the marijuana to nearly 300 patients and have a waitlist of 2,000. The CBD is extracted by a chemist who once worked for drug giant Pfizer, mixed with olive oil so it can be ingested through the mouth or the feeding tube that many sufferers from childhood epilepsy use, then sent to a third-party lab to test its purity.

Charlotte takes the medication twice a day. "A year ago, she could only say one word," her father said. "Now she says complete sentences." The recovery of Charlotte and other kids has inspired the Figis and others to travel the country, pushing for medical marijuana laws or statutes that would allow high-CBD, low-THC pot strains.

ork state legislative panel to legalize medical marijuana while his wife, Aileen, was in the family's new rental house in Colorado Springs, giving Charlotte's Web to their daughter Elizabeth, 4. The family only relocated to Colorado after neurologists told them Elizabeth's best hope — brain surgery — could only stop some of her seizures.

"It's a very big strain being away from the rest of our family," Aileen Burger said recently while waiting for her husband to return from a trip to sell their Long Island house. "But she doesn't have to have pieces of her brain removed."

Ray Mirazabegian, an optician in Glendale, Calif., brought Charlotte's Web to his state, where medical marijuana is legal. He convinced the Stanley brothers to give him some seeds he could use to treat his 9-year-old daughter Emily, who spent her days slumped on the couch. Now, she's running, jumping and talking. Mirazabegian is cloning the Charlotte's Web seeds and has opened the California branch of the Stanleys' foundation.

Mirazabegian has begun to distribute the strain to 25 families and has a waitlist of 400. It includes, he said, families willing to move from Japan and the Philippines.

Follow Nicholas Riccardi on Twitter at https://twitter.com/NickRiccardi .

Hemp Growing Going Legit After Decades-Long Ban

Hemp chef Derek Cross helps harvest hemp during the first known harvest of the plant in more than 60 years, in Springfield, Colo. The federal farm bill agreement reached Monday Jan. 27, 2014 reverses decades of prohibition for hemp cultivation. Instead of requiring approval from federal drug authorities to cultivate the plant, the 10 states that have authorized hemp would be allowed to grow it in pilot projects or at colleges and universities for research.

DENVER, COLORADO. (ASSOCIATED PRESS) — The federal government is ready to let farmers grow cannabis — at least the kind that can't get people high.

Hemp — marijuana's non-intoxicating cousin that's used to make everything from clothing to cooking oil — could soon be cultivated in 10 states under a federal farm bill agreement reached late Monday that allows the establishment of pilot growing programs.

The plant's return to legitimacy could clear the way for U.S. farmers to compete in an industry currently dominated by China. Even though it hasn't been grown in the U.S., the country is one of the fastest-growing hemp markets.

In 2011, the U.S. imported $11.5 million worth of legal hemp products, up from $1.4 million in 2000. Most of that growth was seen in hemp seed and hemp oil, which finds its way into granola bars and other products.

"This is big," said Eric Steenstra, president of Vote Hemp, a Washington-based group that advocates for the plant's legal cultivation. "We've been pushing for this a long time." Legalized growing of hemp had congressional allies from both ends of the political spectrum. Democrats from marijuana-friendly states have pushed to legalize hemp cultivation, as have Republicans from states where the fibrous plant could be a profitable new crop.

"We are laying the groundwork for a new commodity market for Kentucky farmers," Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said in a statement. McConnell was a lead negotiator on the inclusion of hemp in the farm bill.

The full House and Senate still must agree on the bill that will head to the House floor Wednesday. State departments of agriculture then must designate hemp-cultivation pilot projects for research purposes.

Hemp and marijuana are the same species, Cannabis sativa. Marijuana, however, is cultivated to dramatically increase THC, a psychoactive chemical that exists in trace amounts in hemp. Hemp has historically been used for rope but has hundreds of other uses: clothing and mulch from the fiber, foods such as hemp milk and cooking oil from the seeds, and creams, soap and lotions.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew hemp, but centuries later the plant was swept up in anti-drug efforts and growing it without a federal permit was banned in the 1970 Controlled Substances Act.

The last Drug Enforcement Administration hemp permit was issued in 1999 for a quarter-acre experimental plot in Hawaii. That permit expired in 2003. The U.S. Department of Agriculture last recorded an industrial hemp crop in the late 1950s, down from a 1943 peak of more than 150 million pounds on 146,200 harvested acres.

It's not clear whether legalized hemp cultivation suggests the federal government is ready to follow the 20 states that have already legalized medical marijuana, including two that also allow its recreational use.

"This is part of an overall look at cannabis policy, no doubt," Steenstra said. However, opponents of legalized pot insist the hemp change doesn't mean marijuana is right behind. Kevin Sabet, director of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a national alliance that opposes pot legalization, downplayed the change to the farm bill.

"On the one hand, I think it's part of a larger agenda to normalize marijuana, by a few," Sabet said. "On the other hand, will it have any difference at the end of the day? I would be highly skeptical of that."

Analysts have predicted legal hemp would remain a boutique crop, and the Congressional Research Service recently cited wildly differing projections about its economic potential. Still, farmers interested in hemp say the farm bill agreement is a giant leap toward a viable hemp industry in this country.

Tom McClain, a Colorado hemp activist who helps connect nascent growers with buyers, said the industry won't get off the ground without more research. "We don't have a compendium of information to go to," McClain said. "We do rely on universities and agricultural research to help us and direct us. We need local research to help drive the correct varieties, so that farmers get the best yield."

Ten states already allow the growing of hemp, though federal drug law has blocked actual cultivation in most. Those states are Colorado, Washington, California, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Vermont and West Virginia.

Earlier this month, the Colorado Department of Agriculture released licensing procedures for farmers interested in raising hemp. About a dozen farmers didn't wait for the state rules and harvested small amounts last year — the nation's first acknowledged hemp crop in more than five decades. No statewide harvest totals were available.

Kristen Wyatt can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/APkristenwyatt
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Hemp portion of the farm bill: http://bit.ly/1ncOCME