It appears that CBD is here to stay.

According to Forbes market research, annual sales of all incarnations of CBD will hit a stupendous 20 billion US dollars by 2024¹! Sales are growing at the rate of 100% or more each year. Perhaps no other drug substance has grown so much so fast!

So what is actually going on? What is so magical about CBD?

For the few still out there who are unaware of what exactly CBD is and how it is related to THC (the active ingredient of marijuana), the internet is replete with many informative sites, far too many to mention here, but I would readily recommend this page for starters.

So, with that said, what are the diseases for which CBD has been approved as treatment thus far? When I say ‘approved’, I mean approval by regulatory bodies such as the FDA (US), EMA (Europe), and HC (Canada), etc. You see, the process works like this – first, the drug maker performs extensive preclinical and clinical testing of the product ending with randomized clinical trials. If the results are significant, the company gathers all the data and sends that to the agencies in the form of a marketing application. The agencies then subject the data to rigorous scientific and statistical review by top notch scientists of their own. For your information, the regulatory agencies take this job extremely seriously and spend enormous amounts of time and tax-payer money doing this.

As for CBD, to date, the FDA has approved only one product, and this approval was for the treatment of a form of epilepsy². What this means is that CBD is NOT officially permitted to be prescribed for any other ailment. Nevertheless, there is so much excitement, what with thousands upon thousands of websites and blogs promoting CBD as a panacea for everything from toe nail fungus to achy hair, with everything in between including cancer. It is impossible to say how many of these claims can be proven, if at all. Since they are not approved indications, it is marketed as a food supplement. Do you know that the FDA has sent out warning letters (this is serious business!) to several manufacturers making false claims? For example, more than 20 companies were warned in 2019 alone!³ To boot, in many cases the products being sold were found to not contain the levels of CBD they claimed to contain! This is a double whammy, if you think about it…not only that the products are not approved but also the bottle you buy may not contain the amount of CBD they say there is!

So, in the absence of official approvals, is there any kind of evidence that CBD is good for any conditions? Again, the answer to this probably depends on who you ask, and I urge people to rely on reputable sites for information. I would start with WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and Harvard Health Publishing, to name some. Please watch out, educate yourselves, and save your money!

Sources:
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/irisdorbian/2019/05/20/cbd-market-could-reach-20-billion-by-2024-says-new-study/#8b2102549d05 – visited: 7 January 2020 .
2. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/fda-regulation-cannabis-and-cannabis-derived-products-including-cannabidiol-cbd#approved – visited: 7 January 2020.
3. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/warning-letters-and-test-results-cannabidiol-related-products – visited: 7 January 2020.