Press Release: Jessica’s Story – The Motivation Behind ParagonCoin

Jessica VerSteeg – Founder of ParagonCoin

I grew up with an amazing man that I ended up dating, Tyler Sash. During his time in the NFL he became a super bowl champion with The New York Giants, But football was not as glamorous as most Americans see it as. He was always in excruciating pain and would constantly ask me if he could smoke weed vs taking the crazy amounts of pharmaceutical pills he was being given from the league Doctors.

I told him no, because I was uneducated about the benefits of cannabis and I was uneducated about the real addiction to opioids. I did not want it to hurt him (I was taught in school if you smoke weed you will end up joining a gang and then do other drugs and then die, I didn’t want that for Ty), I also did not want him to get a random drug test and have it come out positive for weed. After a few years in the NFL Tyler was cut for too many concussions. We retired to our home in Iowa where I took care of him. He was throwing up every day, but the NFL doctors, his family, and our friends would tell me it’s normal after that many concussions and he will get better. He was sleeping almost all day every day, but the NFL doctors, his family, and our friends would tell me it’s normal after that many concussions and that I should let him sleep so his brain can heal. He started to become very depressed, but the NFL doctors, his family, and our friends would tell me he is just young and upset that his NFL career is over. He started to get crazy mood swings and go from super happy to super sad or super funny to super angry, but the NFL doctors, his family, and our friends would tell me it’s his way of dealing with things and in time he will be his old self again. He started to show signs of dementia, but when I brought it up to those around us everyone thought I was crazy some told me if I want out of the relationship I should just leave and stop making stuff up. So I learned to just keep it to myself In order to keep everyone from thinking we were crazy.

Many times Tyler would not make it to the toilet and would throw up on the bathroom floor and I would always be the one to clean it. One day I counted quite a few unresolved pills so I googled what a normal amount of pills would be for someone in pain and I found some scary things telling me that too many pain killers can cause people to throw up and that there really was such thing as an addiction to painkillers. So I Looked around for his pills and I ended up finding bottles hidden all over our home with the labels ripped off. So I confronted him about this and I told him I know he once told me he was scared he would get addicted and that I was here to help. For some reason this made things worse and we were fighting even more. He would often times tell me during these fights that he will take pills to kill himself or shoot himself in the stomach because thinks there is something wrong with his brain and he will prove to me it’s not the pills it’s his brain and that since in his mind the pills did not affect him negatively he felt I should allow him to keep taking them. I had no idea what CTE was at that time and since everyone told me there was no way he had dementia I just stuck to the only problem I could see and that was his addiction to Thee pills and said he needed to stop taking so many.

After a really bad fight I ended up in the hospital and my family found out everything I had been hiding. Like a normal family, they realized I was in a bad place and moved me out of the house that night. Once I was healthy enough to leave the hospital I went home and started looking up as much as I could about addiction and saw cannabis had saved so many and that’s when I started thinking about cannabis and how things might have been different if I had just let him smoke for his pain.

I could not stay in Iowa because when you are in love it’s hard to not go back, so I moved far away. I moved to San Francisco because it was a place I knew no one and I could just start over. I thought I would move here and write a cool book, But instead, I made a lot of new friends who were all very successful. From athletes to lawyers from housewives to CEOs of cool start ups, and everyone used cannabis in some form or another from CBD capsules to smoking 24k gold joints and to my surprise they were all functioning properly, showing up to meetings or baseball practice on time and none of them were joining gangs like I was taught in school. That’s really when my eyes opened to a new side of cannabis.

I wanted to tell everyone back home about my new thoughts on cannabis, but I was scared they would all judge me. I wanted to tell Tyler what I found out about cannabis, but I had an ego and since I told him I will not talk to him until it’s been one year of our break up and he can prove to me he was clean I didn’t want to go back on what I said. Unfortunately, because of my ignorance Tyler passed away from an accidental OD with a deadly combination of Painkillers exactly one year and one month after our break up. Thankfully my mom was out here (San Francisco) visiting me and she was able to catch me when I got the news that Tyler had passed away, my body just fell over and my mom just held me in the middle of a busy San Francisco day.

I kept asking myself what I could have done to have saved the relationship we had and what I could have done to have saved his life.

Although I could not change history and bring him back I decided to change the future and help others see the medicinal side of cannabis. So I decided to start a monthly subscription of products that were lab tested, properly labeled, and beautifully packaged all delivered in an elegant and sophisticated box. I once thought anything marijuana related was “bad”. Now after intensive research I see I was misinformed and I want everyone from the average housewife to your favorite NFL player to feel comfortable trying the products we send them every month in the privacy of their own home. AuBox is designed to take away the “stoner image” and create more of a comfortable luxury brand.

After running AuBox I saw many problems from renting office space to trust of lab results. So I have decided to solve These problems with blockchain and an ICO.

Problems

There is no unified solution for medical cannabis ID’s, prescription registry and/or validation of CBD/THC level. I have a system in my backend that verifies Medical Marijuana ID’s from the top 10 databases, but those ID’s coming from small mom and pop doctor offices that are not registered I have to call manually to confirm they issued that particular ID and then I have to call and confirm they are a real doctor. This should all be in one system and easy to verify, just like a state ID.

Payment method is limited to cash only, due to federal regulations. Although many in the cannabis industry choose to take CC, PayPal, Venom, etc, illegally we chose not to break that law and instead work on changing it.

There is no trusted method for validating the quality of cannabis being sold.

There are limited workplaces for cannabis start-ups.

ParagonCoin Solutions

Our blockchain will hold all data relating to doctor registry, marijuana Identification and prescriptions.

Our coin will be used as a means of payment between industry players. For the time being, it will not be used as payment for the actual cannabis product itself in places it’s forbidden, but as soon as the regulations change, we are ready to process millions of sale events.

Our blockchain will hold all relevant data about cannabis – throughout the full life cycle, from seeds to a retail product (including the event of the sale). Moreover, the end user can track the entire life cycle of his or her product – knowing that the data can be trusted in full. Ex. what strain it is Indica or Sativa, if it’s organic or chemically altered, levels of THC/THC-A/CBD, etc.

We will build out work places for cannabis start-ups to work from. In these work places, they will use our coin to pay for rent, to pay for lab tests/results from our in house lab, or even to pay for coffee at the cafe in our Paragon workplaces.

ParagonCoinTrusted team:

Our team proudly includes current or past employees of major technology companies (Google, Facebook, Y Combinator), major financial institutions (City National Bank), people with vast experience is Public Relations, Government Relations, marketing, software development. Our development team counts persons in Ukraine and US, who own a crypto-currency exchange.

We employ three PR teams – one for cannabis-related media, one for blockchain-related media, and one for mainstream media.

Marketing is done by two major teams, with experience in multiple successful multi-million dollar ICOs (Chronobank, Gitawatt, Civic, Storj, among others).

Our own marketing team, from Peak Mediation, is managing outside contractors.

Our own cannabis team, coming from the industry, has a network of passionate supporters.

Paragon Coin SEC and ICO

The SEC uses the Howey test to decide if an asset is a ‘security’. We pass the test with flying colors – NOT a security, but a product/utility token.

HIPAA Compliance

Generally, blockchain is NOT HIPAA-compliant. But we have a solution, see our presentation for details. We created our own blockchain tailored to medical and recreational industry needs and regulations.