I knew I'd arrived in California when a friend offered me an edible — for my dog.
The treat didn't contain THC, the component of marijuana that's responsible for getting you high. Instead, it was made with cannabidiol, or CBD, a non-psychoactive compound in cannabis.
CBD is thought to be responsible for many of marijuana's therapeutic effects, including pain relief and reducing inflammation or swelling. Because of that, the compound may have a range of therapeutic applications, but research on it remains in its infancy — mostly due to marijuana's status as a Schedule I drug in the US, which limits the scope of medical research on it.
Thanks to a wave of developments into new cannabis-based drugs, however, efforts to harness CBD's medicinal properties are likely to ramp up.
The most well documented application of CBD so far is as a potential treatment for some rare forms of epilepsy. Earlier this month, a US Food and Drug Administration committee gave a major green light to a medicine called Epidiolex, which is designed to treat two rare childhood forms of epilepsy. If Epidiolex gets the final okay, it would become the first FDA-approved drug made with CBD.
Drug companies like GW Pharmaceuticals, which is behind Epidiolex, and a handful of startups — some of which have support from pharma giants like Johnson & Johnson — are now finding ways to study CBD. Researchers are looking into applications for mental health disorders like anxiety and depression, skin conditions, and diseases like arthritis.
'It's the inconsistency from product to product that concerns me'
In states where marijuana is legal, it is relatively easy to purchase products that claim to be packed with CBD.
But these items don't have to undergo the same federal approval process that drugs do, so there's a lot of room for error. CBD oils sold at dispensaries may have varying concentrations of the compound from batch to patch or even product to product.
Laura Lubbers, the chief scientific officer of a non-profit called CURE that funds epilepsy research, told Business Insider that's a concern for parents who seek out CBD oil to help control their children's seizures.
"It's the inconsistency from product to product that concerns me as a researcher," Lubbers said. "You may get good results with one product and then go back to that dispensary and buy the same product and find that it may have a different effect."
Epidiolex, by comparison, is a well studied and well controlled product that is currently pending FDA approval to treat Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome.
SOURCE: Erin Brodwin, Business Insider - Apr 22 2018
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