-You've probably started seeing CBD products
popping up in a lot of places --
pharmacies, health-food stores, farmers' markets.
One place it's not supposed to show up -- Amazon.
But the e-commerce giant has become an outlet
for CBD supplements,
despite Amazon's policy barring those items.
That's because the vast retail site,
where consumers search through 500 million items
on any given day,
is too large for even the tech giant to thoroughly police.
Sellers use alternative terms,
like "hemp oil" or "hemp extract,"
to avoid Amazon's detection algorithms
that would likely sniff out those listings and remove them.
So, to see if third-party merchants
were violating Amazon's policy, we decided to buy 13 products
that had high likelihood of containing CBD
and have them tested at EVIO Labs in Berkeley, California.
We should note that Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff
Bezos owns The Washington Post.
David Egerton is the lab director at EVIO
and tested each of the products
to determine if they include CBD.
Okay, so, let's look at the Select CBD products.
Does this product have CBD in it?
-It does.
There's close to 900 milligrams in the container.
-And maybe another giveaway -- it says "CBD" on the label.
-It does, indeed.
-If I were to go to a natural-food store in Berkeley,
and purchase a CBD product from them,
would it have a similar profile?
Would it have about 30%,
milligrams to milliliter, of CBD in it?
-It's very difficult to say that for sure,
because a lot of these products
have a wide range of concentrations that we see.
Even in what we see in front of us here,
you know, we can see, there's some products
that claim to have 5 milligrams per serving,
others that claim to have 100.
-Let's look at Restorative Botanicals.
Does this have CBD in it? -It does, indeed.
In comparison to the other sample
that we just looked at, there was, say --
where there was only CBD detected,
here we see a variety of cannabinoids,
including THC, at a very low level.
But this variety of cannabinoids indicates
that it was likely manufactured
using what they referred to as a full-spectrum hemp oil.
-Okay, let's go to the Lazarus Naturals.
Does this product have CBD in it?
-It absolutely does. -And again, dead giveaway,
it says "CBD tincture."
So, now, let's talk about this one.
This is a tincture made by a company called Tranquilo.
What was interesting to me about this company is,
its Twitter handle is AmazonBestCBD.
Is there any CBD in this one?
-There was no CBD detected in this sample.
[chuckles] -This also says on its label
"hemp oil, 500 milligrams."
Is there 500 milligrams
of anything in this that you detected?
-Uh, none of the cannabinoids that we report.
-Today we asked you to check 13 products.
We have them all lined up here.
Of these 13 products, how many actually had CBD in them?
-11 out of the 13 contained CBD.
-And the two that didn't is this one oil from Tranquilo --
-Mm-hmm. -And the other,
the Hemp Gummies here from Mix Rx.
-Correct. -So, even though Amazon
prohibits the sale of CBD products
on its website,
we found 11 out of our 13 products
purchased contained the substance.
After informing Amazon of our purchases and testing,
the company removed some,
but not all, of the product listings.
Amazon said the company requires merchants
to follow selling guidelines
and that it has teams that use machine-learning tools
to keep prohibited products out of its marketplace.
But the company declined to say it believed
that no CBD products were available on its
site.