Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren bog Obam here. If you're at all plugged into
Speaker 1: trendy health and wellness culture, you've probably heard of c
Speaker 1: b D oil, the cannabis extract that doesn't get you
Speaker 1: high but has been touted as a potential remedy for
Speaker 1: everything from anxiety, to aches and pains and insomnia. At
Speaker 1: your local health food store or on the internet, you
Speaker 1: can find it in the form of drops, capsules, and
Speaker 1: edible gummies. Some baristas are using it as an ingredient
Speaker 1: in latte's, and hip bars are mixing it with alcohol
Speaker 1: to serve up cb D cocktails. There's even CBD toast
Speaker 1: and CBD facial masks and spas. But there's more to
Speaker 1: CBD than hipster hype. P d X, a drug containing CBD,
Speaker 1: was recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration
Speaker 1: for treatment of seizures related to too rare forms of epilepsy,
Speaker 1: and a growing number of studies suggests that it may
Speaker 1: be useful in treating other disorders as well. And remarkably,
Speaker 1: that's all happening even though cb D remains technically illegal
Speaker 1: at the FED oral level, with the exception of the
Speaker 1: epilepsy medication mentioned above. However, that prohibition, at least for now,
Speaker 1: is not being aggressively enforced, and at the state level,
Speaker 1: CBDs legality varies. But underneath all of the hype, what
Speaker 1: is CBD oil anyway? Cannaby e all or cb D
Speaker 1: is a chemical compound that can be extracted from the
Speaker 1: cannabis plant. Unlike delta nine tetrahydrocannabinal or th HC, which
Speaker 1: is the chemical ingredient that may lead a pot smoker
Speaker 1: to get the giggles or play in terminable air guitar solos,
Speaker 1: CBD does not get a user stoned. Th HC and
Speaker 1: cb D have vastly different effects, according to cannabis researcher
Speaker 1: Joshua Kaplan, an assistant professor in the Behavioral Neuroscience program
Speaker 1: at Western Washington University. Unlike t HC, which gets its
Speaker 1: effect from acting upon certain cannabinoid receptors in the nervous system,
Speaker 1: cb D has sixty five known targets in the brain
Speaker 1: and body. Kaplan says, for example, CBD activates the same
Speaker 1: serotonin receptors that are acted upon by selective so tonein
Speaker 1: reuptake inhibitors, or s sr eyes, which are a frequently
Speaker 1: prescribed class of antidepressant medications. The CBD does not interact
Speaker 1: with those receptors in exactly the same way, but the
Speaker 1: serotonin system does seem key in treating anxiety. CBDs effect
Speaker 1: on multiple systems in the brain and body make it
Speaker 1: a potentially useful treatment for a wide range of different conditions,
Speaker 1: from inflammation and migraines to spasms caused by multiple sclerosis.
Speaker 1: Kaplan says, but that doesn't necessarily mean that CBD is
Speaker 1: a panacea. While there have been large, well designed studies
Speaker 1: on CBD as a treatment for different types of epilepsy,
Speaker 1: much of the information about other possible uses comes from
Speaker 1: anecdotal reports, case reports, case series, and small studies. That's
Speaker 1: according to Timothy Welty, a professor of pharmacy practice and
Speaker 1: chairman of the Department of Clinical Sciences at Drake University
Speaker 1: in Des Moines, Iowa. While sources like those small reports
Speaker 1: and studies can provide interesting information, they're also prone to
Speaker 1: placebo effects. Well to explained via email, he said, they
Speaker 1: are often not reproducible. The situations that are described are
Speaker 1: usually not well controlled to demonstrate the effect of CBD
Speaker 1: and eliminate potential confounding factors. For this reason, they are
Speaker 1: not considered as strong evidence for the efficiency of a drug. Additionally,
Speaker 1: the limited scale of that CBD research makes it difficult
Speaker 1: to detect side effects, drug interactions, and other potential problems
Speaker 1: because there are too few patients involved. Wealthy says, but
Speaker 1: many people out there aren't content to wait for more
Speaker 1: scientific studies or f D approval of medications containing CBD. Instead,
Speaker 1: they're experimenting with CBD on their own to see if
Speaker 1: it works for whatever ails them. But CBD may not
Speaker 1: work for everything that people want to use it for,
Speaker 1: though some are using it as an insomnia remedy, for example,
Speaker 1: there's little evidence that CBD helps people whose sleeplessness isn't
Speaker 1: caused by an impairing symptoms such as anxiety or chronic pain,
Speaker 1: Caplan says, and unscientific self experimentation is also a concern
Speaker 1: to researchers such as Kaplan, who explains that different conditions
Speaker 1: might call for very different dosages of CBD. He said
Speaker 1: that the dose range can be quite narrow. For example,
Speaker 1: in a Brazilian study published in eighteen on CBDs effect
Speaker 1: in relieving anxiety associated with public speaking. Researchers gave different
Speaker 1: doses of CBD to fifty seven male subjects. They found
Speaker 1: that the dose of three hundred milligrams significantly reduced anxiety
Speaker 1: for subjects, but those who took a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: milligrams or six hundred milligrams showed no significant difference. Furthermore,
Speaker 1: dosing can be tricky because CBD products of the sort
Speaker 1: sold in health food stores or online are not regulated
Speaker 1: by the f d A. A study published in the
Speaker 1: Journal of the American Medical Association found that nearly sevent
Speaker 1: of CBD products from those sources either had lower or
Speaker 1: higher doses than the labels indicated. And for something that's
Speaker 1: so widely available in stores and on the internet, CBDs
Speaker 1: legal status is murky. Even though it doesn't get anyone stoned.
Speaker 1: The US Drug Enforcement Administration that's the d e A,
Speaker 1: classifies it as a Schedule one controlled inbstance, just like cannabis.
Speaker 1: According to d e A spokesperson Katherine Faff, the agency
Speaker 1: doesn't distinguish between c b D extracted from a high
Speaker 1: th HC cannabis plant of the sort grown to produce marijuana,
Speaker 1: and cb D that comes from hemp, a form of
Speaker 1: cannabis that contains only a tiny amount of th HC.
Speaker 1: The CBD that's available in health food stores is of
Speaker 1: the hemp variety. In April, the d e a's position
Speaker 1: on cb D that it should be a Schedule one
Speaker 1: substance because it is extracted from cannabis was upheld by
Speaker 1: a federal appeals court, but the judges also noted that
Speaker 1: farm legislation passed by Congress in two which allows states
Speaker 1: to experiment with hemp production, could give CBD marketers a
Speaker 1: legal out, providing they can verify that CBD was produced
Speaker 1: from hemp grown in states that have legal hemp programs,
Speaker 1: and in September, the d e A did announce that
Speaker 1: exception for a p d Alex, the FDA approved seizure
Speaker 1: medication containing cb D, which it classified as Schedule five,
Speaker 1: the category four medications with a low Potential or abuse.
Speaker 1: FAFT says that the d e A would do the
Speaker 1: same thing for other CBD drugs that come up through
Speaker 1: the FDA pipeline that didn't change CBDs overall classification, though,
Speaker 1: although CBD technically remains a controlled substance, the d e
Speaker 1: A is not going out of its way to enforce
Speaker 1: that prohibition, and it's not targeting CBD users. Fath explained, quote,
Speaker 1: We're more focused on major drug traffickers and the opioid crisis.
Speaker 1: That leaves CBD up to individual states whose laws vary.
Speaker 1: According to Justin Struggle, political director and federal lobbyist for
Speaker 1: the National Organization for the Reformation of Marijuana Laws, CBD
Speaker 1: is definitely in the clear in the nine states plus
Speaker 1: the District of Columbia that have legalized cannabis used for adults,
Speaker 1: and in the thirty one states that have legalized medical cannabis,
Speaker 1: CBD is legal if a person has an authorization form
Speaker 1: from a physician. To other states, Indiana and Kansas have
Speaker 1: passed laws legalizing CBD from hemp, even though they don't
Speaker 1: allow medical or recreational use of cannabis. Streuckle says there
Speaker 1: have been very few instances of consumers actually facing criminal
Speaker 1: charges for purchasing CBD derived from hemp. And meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: right Field Group, a market research firm, predicts that CBD
Speaker 1: will be a twenty two billion dollar industry by the
Speaker 1: year two. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Kaiger
Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and
Speaker 1: lots of other topics, visit our home planet, how stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com.