Why does it feel like so many media outlets discovered
CBD in the past year?
Media, including Consumer Reports,
descended upon the CBD space within the last year,
and there's a very good reason for it.
Because CBD starts showing up everywhere.
It starts showing up in coffee bars,
in brownies and candy and things.
CBD is a compound found in cannabis plants,
including hemp and marijuana plants.
CBD is like a scatter shot.
There's a whole bunch of different systems
that it's influencing, one of which
is the endocannabinoid system and lots of others as well.
So this is why you see something that works for anxiety,
potentially for pain, potentially
for pediatric seizures, right?
A wide host of things, because there's
a wide number of different mechanisms that it hits.
The scientific research has lagged, particularly
in the area of CBD.
Most of the research that has been done
has been on THC, which is delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol,
and that is the primary psychoactive
molecule in the plant.
That's responsible for feeling high.
More recently, probably in the past five to 10 years,
has there been focus on CBD, or cannabidiol.
That's kind of the second most abundant molecule in the plant,
and it really came out of grass roots, if you will,
of people trying it out on the ground in Colorado,
in other countries, in England, trying it out and seeing
that it actually helped with pediatric epilepsy,
which is kind of where it got its initial buzz.
One of the ways that I stayed sane,
honestly for the decade I tried to keep my son alive
was research.
And so I actually had heard about cannabis for epilepsy.
For me when I take it, it calms the anxiety.
Or if I start to feel a headache coming on or a migraine.
It seemed very natural that Consumer Reports
wanted to step in and try to understand what is this market?
What are these products?
What do the labels say that they are?
Are they safe?
Are they tested?
Do they work?
And how much are they?
And who's regulating them?
And that's where we entered into this conversation.
Now, despite promising anecdotal evidence,
we actually know very little about cannabidiol,
because there is limited research.
And as the Chairman mentioned, what we learned
was a conflict between the Department of Justice
and the Department of Health, which
prevented that research being done, because it was a Schedule
I drug.
Is CBD legal?
So the crazy answer to that is, it depends.
Is CBD legal?
It depends on where you live.
How strange is that?
Can you imagine not being able to buy Tylenol in Ohio,
but you can buy it in Indiana?
That is what we're talking about.
And we don't always understand what's
the real world application.
Like flying with CBD.
It seems like in a state where it's legal, that you should
be able to get on a plane.
But you may not really want to do that until it
becomes federally legal.
What would Consumer Reports like to see happen in the CBD space
to protect consumers?
Sure.
So the most important thing that would protect consumers
is clear regulatory environment.
Alignment between the states and the federal government
on all things, including just the legality of possession
and sales.
How products are manufactured, how products are tested,
how products are sold, how products are labeled,
and we'd also like see more research in this space
so that the consumer has some assurance that purchasing
that product will actually help treat the symptom
that they're seeking.
My son, Zaki started having seizures
when he was four months old, and he
had had over 500,000 seizures by the time he was five.
And we had been through 17 pharmaceuticals.
He has a rare catastrophic form of early childhood epilepsy.
And he transitioned to hospice palliative services.
Were you mentally preparing yourself for his death?
Yeah, as a mom and being faced with what the situation was,
just on Facebook, they do this memory thing that pops up.
And it was his EEG that was December
of 2011, which was right before we started this.
And an EEG is an electrical scan of the brain,
and he was having of seizure activity every 10 seconds.
And so you know their little bodies
and their little brains just can't keep doing that.
But also, you don't quit.
You never quit.
You can't.
No one else is going to fight.
And so at the same time of trying to accept things the way
that they were was the necessity to make sure
that that didn't happen.
Back then, it was CBD and honey.
And so I gave him his first dose just in the mouth
like you'd give a baby Tylenol.
So it's a liquid.
He's not smoking anything.
And his seizures didn't start.
He fell asleep.
And two minutes pass, and 10 minutes pass,
and his seizures didn't start.
And I thought, you have got to be kidding me.
And he didn't have a seizure for 48 hours.
And they returned, they were less frequent,
they were less severe, but his seizures came back.
And so we just slowly titrated up,
just like we've done for the previous decade of everything
that we've tried.
So Zaki was almost 10 years old and incontinent
and didn't know his colors and couldn't write his name
and had very, very poor memory.
So where he was at was he was very developmentally delayed.
And where is he now?
He is 15 years old.
He's toilet trained.
He's learning sight words.
So he knows his alphabet, he's learning how to read,
he can do basic addition.
He's hysterical.
He's so funny.
He's so sensitive and cares about how you're feeling.
He's in a lot of ways a very typical 15-year-old boy.
He's talking about his house he's going to get
and how I'm not going to live with him.
And it's just absolutely incredible.
It's amazing.
We're here in the foothills of Appalachia.
We're on the edge of the coalfields,
so we don't have vast acres to farm.
We have limited acreage, so we need
to have a high value crop, a high quality crop
that we can grow basically for a cash crop.
When you talk to people who don't know anything about hemp
and don't know anything about CBD,
how do you begin to tell them about it?
People know that I'm growing this crop, and a lot of them,
they first automatically assume you're
growing medical marijuana.
That's your first thing.
You have to educate people, this is not medical marijuana.
It's hemp.
Medical marijuana is still illegal in the state
of Kentucky.
So this is industrial hemp, but it does produce CBD.
We've been primarily a tobacco farm.
The tobacco industry, of course as everyone knows,
is in decline.
So we've always been looking for alternatives.
So three years ago we actually grew our first hemp crop,
and we thought, this is something that could really
fit in our operation and something
we could produce that we would be proud to be producing.
That would be Kentucky grown, and like I said,
if you can grow something that can help a kid with epilepsy,
that's just huge.
It's a great feeling.
So when we harvest, it's much like tobacco.
We actually go in and we hand cut it.
We take it and we dry it in some dryers
we have here on the farm.
And once we dry it, we actually separate the leaf and bud
material from the stock.
And that's actually the material that we have that we sell.
And then, of course, the bud material
is where the CBD is at, and that'll go to an extractor,
and that's where the extraction, CBD will be extracted
from the bud material.
I feel like next year that there'll probably
be more demand for hemp than what there are farmers
to produce it, is my feeling.
And what makes you say that?
Just because the emerging markets, they can't sit idle.
So next three or four years, I think demand is there
for hemp production.
I've covered pharmaceutical medications
and over-the-counter medications and supplements for over 15
years, and I have never seen any product
that both has medical benefit for very difficult to treat
conditions that also may have a supplement
benefit for conditions like anxiety, insomnia, pain,
and that also may be used in a recreational space.
Is there any interest as a possible alternative or weaning
mechanism for opioid addiction?
Yes.
There are a number of studies that
are going on that are looking at the interaction
between both THC and CBD in relation to opiates
and trying to see if there are some ways of curbing
opiate use, but not just opiates.
The National Institutes of Drug Abuse
funded a study looking at CBD and tobacco, nicotine
addiction.
There's been work that's looked at cocaine addiction.
So all of those things, I think there's potential.
There's theory that makes sense within the space,
and we'll see what happens with the research.
I think it's pretty exciting.
When I look back on that time period
where I was on a lot of medications,
I actually had so many that my medicine cabinet was just
a bunch of yellow bottles prescribed by the VA.
I served active duty in the Navy for four years.
We stepped on board the USS Harry S.
Truman for her maiden voyage, and we were the relieving
battle group for the USS Cole.
I was injured on board the Truman, actually,
right off the bat.
I tripped over the catch wire carrying roughly 180 pounds
worth of tie down chains.
So I basically destroyed my left knee and my lower back
simultaneously.
When were you first prescribed opioids or opiates?
In 2000 when I destroyed my knee.
And for how long did you take them?
13 years.
Did they work?
To an extent.
After a certain point, you get moved from one type of opioid
to another, so I had gone from basically Naproxen to Tramadol
to vicodin and Oxy, and in the end
I was taking morphine tablets.
And for me looking back, my mental state just was like,
I was there but I wasn't.
It was just like a shell of me.
Hi, here's Veronica, but she's not present.
She's faking it .
So when I made an appointment with my primary care physician
at the time, she actually recommended
that I go out and get a card for medical marijuana
and see if that was effective for me.
And how high did you feel?
I was pretty out of it for a while.
And that was one of the effects that I really
didn't like about marijuana.
So I talked to some of the dispensaries
about what can I do to kind of mitigate this feeling?
And they had actually suggested trying pure CBD from the hemp
plant.
And did you feel relief immediately with the CBD?
I didn't really feel relief right away,
but I felt like after about 30 days of consistently taking it,
I started to feel normal again.
And how do you feel now today?
I feel alive.
I don't I don't feel like the world is coming down
on top of me anymore.
And for me, that's big.
I think the important thing to understand
and I think the hard part is the disconnect between how much is
in those bottles at a dispensary that you order online
and how much is required for clinical effect.
Now, some people say, I use 10 milligrams
and I feel wonderful.
And again, there's no clinical data to support that.
If you wanted to dose like you're
seeing in the clinical trials where you actually
see separation from placebo, it's a lot.
So a few examples.
Social anxiety, 600 milligrams a day.
That's a lot.
Adults with osteoarthritis of the knee
or other types of pain, 500 to 1,000 depending on the study.
So I mean, you're not in the tens.
And if you look at the bottles, like some of the bottles,
it's like this whole bottle is 500 milligrams.
So like, you're drinking that bottle in a day.
And that's a lot.
The interesting thing, about one out of every four Americans
has tried CBD, that's according to a nationally
representative survey that Consumer Reports just
completed.
The majority of people told us CBD
was effective for the problem they were trying to treat.
A solution to what?
Are they hoping to solve?
Sure.
So one of the most common reasons people
have tried CBD is pain management and anxiety
and insomnia.
I've always loved to be outside.
So I've always hiked and jogged and walked,
and running is just a great way to get
outside, get in the woods.
It's a great way to start the day.
It feels like every day's a vacation.
You can get out and run before work, after work.
I try to run six days a week, and I
had tendinitis of my outer foot and also my knee.
I've had knee tendinitis, and so I did the normal things.
Rest, ice.
It didn't help.
And that my friend lent me some CBD,
and I didn't really intend to use it.
But it was there, and a couple days, my tendinitis
was still there.
And I used it, and it went away immediately.
I was surprised, and yeah.
So then, I've started using it when I've had tendinitis,
and it seems to work.
And you've only used a topical ointment?
Yes, yes.
Why haven't you tried tinctures?
I think mostly what I've seen people use them
for is anxiety and sleep disturbance, which
I don't think I suffer from.
So I haven't really had any--
I don't have any other inflammatory other
than the local inflammation, and that's pretty rare.
So I don't feel I really needed anything.
I'm also a little nervous, a little apprehensive.
The topical seems like totally safe to me.
The tincture, I'd like to see more information.
Do you worry at all about trusting what's in that bottle?
Yes.
Yes, for sure.
I think that at least what I've read about CBD
is that's the biggest concern is what's
in it, who's manufacturing it, where it comes from,
and I think with a lot of supplements,
I have many, many patients who take supplements.
And I tell them, I think that especially pregnant patients,
that's a big risk always is what's
in it, things that don't have to be added to the label.
I think that's the scary part of supplements.
We wanted to do a study to really look at CBD products
that were out on the market, be it CBD oils in containers,
vape oils, anything really that was liquid CBD to see
what does the market look like and really
the point is, how accurately labeled are these products?
And in this study, 70% or so of products were mislabeled.
Some containing more CBD than was labeled
and some containing less CBD than was labeled.
And a lot of products also contained
THC or other cannabinoids in there that weren't necessarily
on the labels at all.
So beyond, I'm getting less of the drug or more of the drug
than I expect, but I'm also getting
some other things in there that I might want to be avoiding.
And so from a consumer standpoint,
it was a bit alarming.
I think it's very important to be a skeptic in this space,
especially when we're talking about this much money being
spent in this space.
And I think it's important to be realistic about what we know
and our approach to this.
And I really think bifurcating the people that are there
for medicinal use because they have an issue that
can't be currently addressed with existing medications
and the wellness crowd.
I think we really need to differentiate those two crews,
and I think right now it's kind of getting blended a bit.
And I could see that as frustrating
from the medicinal crowd, because they're like, hey,
we're trying to get this medicine or do whatever
and things are getting marketed for more the wellness crowd
in some instances.
So I think it's a pretty difficult space right now.
At the same time, you are hopeful as a researcher
and see great potential?
I do.
I do, but I'm not the one that's going to go out there and say,
it cures everything.
And even seeing it in pediatric epilepsy
or seeing it an anxiety, it works for some,
and it doesn't work for others.
And figuring that nuance out is really important.
But I think its therapeutic potential
is pretty wide ranging.
Consumer Reports, we want to step in and do a large scale
sample test to see exactly what's in those bottles
compared to what those manufacturers are telling you.
And it could be everything from testing how much THC
is present, how much CBD is present,
are there heavy metals in there?
Are there pesticides in there?
Are there solvents in there that should not be in there?
It's Consumer Reports' job to always test.
We test everything.
And why wouldn't we test some of the most popular products
to make sure what they say is in there is actually in there?