CBD Is a Scam. Will New Cannabinoid Products Be Any Different?
/By Crystal Lindell
CBD didn’t do anything for me. I tried different brands, different formats, and different price points because I really wanted it to work.
I like to describe my experience like this: Wine and grape juice are both made from grapes – but that doesn’t mean a glass of Welch's has the same effect as a glass of wine.
From the beginning, CBD always sounded a little too good to be true. Touted as the “cannabis that doesn’t get you high, but treats chronic pain,” it was supposed to be the new holy grail of pain medicine. After all, doctors are looking for something to give patients that doesn’t give them any pleasurable mental effects, but does actually treat their pain.
Unfortunately, CBD was too good to be true because the marketing and hype are fake.
For a while, CBD seemed to be sold in every gas station, supermarket and convenience store. Filling shelves with everything from candies to liquid elixirs.
But I’ve noticed over the last couple years that a lot of those CBD display cases have either shrunk or disappeared completely.
It’s not just in my head. A 2023 article from SupplySide Supplement Journal was among the first to report on the downward trend in the sector.
Headlined: "Major CBD brands report steep annual sales declines,” it focused on the fact that two major brands, CV Sciences and Charlotte’s Web, reported depressed earnings and “significant downsizing initiatives.”
Almost a year later, The New York Times published a similar article, with the headline “Companies Were Big on CBD. Not Anymore.”
The article blamed the sales decline on a “lack of federal regulation and a mishmash of state laws [that] made selling products featuring the cannabis-derived ingredient not worth the trouble.”
I think that’s just generous industry framing. Sales declined because CBD products were not good and inordinately expensive. CBD did not do much of anything for most people, and the price points were astronomical.
A 2024 study at Bath University in the U.K. makes the point directly. The subhead on a press release reads: "There is no evidence that CBD products reduce chronic pain, and taking them is a waste of money and potentially harmful to health, new research finds."
“CBD presents consumers with a big problem,” said Professor Chris Eccleston, who led the research at the Centre for Pain Research at Bath. “It’s touted as a cure for all pain but there’s a complete lack of quality evidence that it has any positive effects. It’s almost as if chronic pain patients don’t matter, and that we’re happy for people to trade on hope and despair.”
Eccleston is definitely right there. The views of chronic pain patients are often dismissed. That’s why many doctors are happy to push placebos and snake oils on us, as long as it means they can avoid prescribing any opioids.
The decline in CBD’s popularity hasn’t stopped the medical industry from trying to find other ways to use cannabinoids to treat pain without causing the mental high.
Last week, researchers at Stanford University and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis announced that they designed a new compound to potentially treat chronic pain by targeting type 1 cannabinoid (CB1) receptors in the peripheral nervous system.
In a paper published in Nature, the researchers said the compound “could effectively treat multiple types of pain in mouse models without causing the psychoactive side effects typically associated with the CB1 receptor or causing the mice to build up a tolerance to it.”
So it’s still being studied in mice, which means it’s a long way off from being offered to humans, if it ever is.
While this is a synthetic version of a cannabinoid – as opposed to the natural version – I’m skeptical of anything that claims to treat physical pain without psychoactive side effects.
It’s also frustrating to see researchers still trying to push for this at all.
In a news release about the study, co-author Alexander Powers, who conducted the work while earning his PhD in chemistry at Stanford, said: “This molecule shows that we can get a separation between the side effects and the analgesic effects – we can target the CB1 receptor and get the good effects without the bad.”
The most telling part of that quote is at the very end: “without the bad.”
The implication is that psychoactive effects are inherently bad. I disagree. When you’re in extreme pain, it impacts you emotionally and mentally. So it only makes sense that medications that treat pain also improve your mood. That’s a good side effect.
Maybe research like that coming out of Stanford will lead to new breakthroughs. Maybe they will finally discover the holy grail of pain medication that they desperately seek. But I remain skeptical of any research from people who frame positive effects of pain medication as “bad.”
