Here\u2019s a thought experiment: What if you \u2014 and almost everyone else around you \u2014are all the victims of a grand misunderstanding of what marijuana\u2019s less-intoxicating ingredient CBD actually is and does?<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s put this to the test. Go to the search engine of your choice. Type in CBD and hit return. As it turns out, almost every result is going to declare CBD to be \u201cnon-psychoactive.\u201d All of those assertions are wrong and either knowing or unknowing perpetrators of what\u2019s probably the greatest mass misconception in marijuana today.<\/p>\n
CBD, or cannabidiol, is one of the many active compounds in the cannabis plant. Unlike THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, it does not impart upon the user the intoxicating effects for which cannabis is known. Instead, CBD is associated with the opposite: with ameliorating THC\u2019s distortions of space, time and sound and with fighting\u00a0anxiety<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0depression<\/a>\u00a0and maybe even\u00a0addiction<\/a>.<\/p>\n In layman\u2019s shorthand: THC is the party animal and CBD is the healer. For these reasons, CBD is popularly known as \u201cnon-psychoactive.\u201d This term is the most-common descriptor applied to CBD, done so by numerous marijuana-industry sources, as well as mainstream media accounts published in The New York\u00a0Times<\/a>, The\u00a0Guardian<\/a>\u00a0and elsewhere.<\/p>\n All of these sources are wrong and are guilty of propagating misinformation. (A confession: I, too, have been responsible for casually peddling this falsehood in the past.)<\/p>\n Of course, CBD\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0psychoactive. That\u2019s the point. If it weren\u2019t, far fewer people would care about it. You would not know its name. It wouldn\u2019t be the hottest and newest wellness ingredient in Brooklyn self-care shops and \u2014 certainly wouldn\u2019t be the main component of\u00a0a new FDA-approved pharmaceutical drug to treat epilepsy<\/a>.<\/p>\n As Dr. Ethan Russo, one of the foremost cannabis researchers, told The Leaf<\/a>,\u00a0\u201cVery simply stated, what is clear about CBD is that it must be considered psychoactive because of its ability to act as an anti-anxiety agent and an anti-psychotic agent.\u201d<\/p>\n Merriam-Webster\u2019s dictionary\u00a0defines<\/a>\u00a0the term \u201cpsychoactive\u201d as \u201caffecting the mind or body.\u201d At the World Health Organization, \u201cpsychoactive substances\u201d are \u201csubstances that, when taken in or administered into one\u2019s system, affect mental processes, e.g. cognition or affect.\u201d<\/p>\n Under both these definitions, CBD is psychoactive because it is affecting mental processes when it mitigates the \u201chigh feeling\u201d of smoking cannabis or when it helps with anxiety and depression.<\/p>\n This means that it cannot be possible to say in the same breath that CBD is non-psychoactive and that it will help with anxiety and depression.<\/p>\n For example, other psychoactive substances include ibuprofen, caffeine and a glass of wine. If they weren\u2019t \u2014 if they were no more efficacious than a glass of water or a deep breath of air \u2014 then nobody would care.<\/p>\n Martin Lee is the co-founder and director of Project CBD, an educational\u00a0platform<\/a>\u00a0founded in 2010 that provides research and resources on cannabis therapeutics. In the beginning, Lee recently told Cannabis Now that Project CBD also used to refer to CBD as \u201cnon-psychoactive.\u201d<\/p>\n At the time, the idea was to remind the public, especially those subject to decades of anti-marijuana propaganda, that the plant could be \u201cnon-intoxicating.\u201d (Now, Project CBD uses the term \u201cnon-intoxicating\u201d to describe CBD, instead of \u201cnon-psychoactive.)<\/p>\n \u201cAt least in the beginning, it was a way for us to emphasize that there was something else going on with the cannabis plant, that we should look at it differently,\u201d Lee said. \u201cBut I\u2019m uncomfortable with that now. As things went along, the obvious fact started staring us in the face: If it changes one\u2019s mood, even if you\u2019re not getting high, it\u2019s psychoactive.\u201d<\/p>\n Pharmacologically, THC and CBD act in similar ways. Both molecules interact with the CB1 endocannabinoid receptors \u2014 although at different sites and with different effects. A misunderstanding of how the molecules work, based on old science, may be at the root of the grand CBD myth.<\/p>\n Lee\u2019s Project CBD has attempted to\u00a0correct<\/a>\u00a0the record, but like many other rational and reasonable science-based efforts in our post-factual world, it is swimming upstream \u2014 and is working against bad-faith actors intent on marketing CBD in any way possible, to as many cannabis newcomers as possible.<\/p>\n At best, \u201cnon-psychoactive\u201d is an honest mistake stemming from a well-intentioned misunderstanding. At worse, \u201cnon-psychoactive\u201d is an adman\u2019s trick, an intentional misdirection meant to deceive.<\/p>\n The problem is that some CBD products, derived from industrial hemp that\u2019s much lower in CBD content than the grown-for-the-purpose cannabis, might actually be non-psychoactive because there\u2019s not enough CBD present. But that means the product is faulty, not the ingredient itself.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/b>\u00a0did you know that CBD is actually psychoactive?<\/p>\n The post CBD Is Psychoactive \u2014 And That\u2019s OK<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a thought experiment: What if you \u2014 and almost everyone else around you \u2014are all the victims of a grand misunderstanding of what marijuana\u2019s less-intoxicating ingredient CBD actually is and does? Let\u2019s put this to the test. Go to the search engine of your choice. Type in CBD andContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[713,605,50,4687,136,263,53,5813,5814,420],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29248"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29249,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29248\/revisions\/29249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Explanation Behind Why CBD Is Psychoactive<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: CBD Is Psychoactive \u2014 And That\u2019s OK<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"