Active hemp cbd oil scam
Already, the plant extract is being added to cheeseburgers, toothpicks and breath sprays. More than 60 percent of CBD users have taken it for anxiety, according to a survey of 5, people, conducted by the Brightfield Group, a cannabis market research firm. Chronic pain, insomnia and depression follow behind. The professional golfer Bubba Watson drifts off to sleep with it.
A comprehensive guide to buying CBD oil – how to avoid scams
You are now logged in. Forgot your password? Jennifer Aniston uses it for anxiety. Podcast host Joe Rogan applies it for elbow pain. You can buy dog treats infused with it, as well as facial scrubs and hand lotions, tinctures, and vaporizer cartridges. It's used as an ingredient in cocktails, beer, and gummy worms.
It's sold at Amish markets and at fancy boutiques and at prepper depots. In October, it received the ultimate blessing for a trendy new cure-all: It was the subject of a multipart special on daytime basic cable hosted by Dr.
But unlike THC, it doesn't alter perception or sharpen the appetite. Instead, people who use pure CBD report feeling calmed and relaxed. It has all the benefits of marijuana without the high. But alongside all the celebrity buzz and bright marketing claims, there is another, more inspiring type of story about CBD: Children wracked by dozens of severe epileptic seizures a day who are suddenly well, their desperate parents weeping in relief.
Although there is a near-complete absence of data concerning casual, low-dose use in lollipops or scented skin creams, a growing body of scientific evidence shows the efficacy of large doses of pure CBD for treating certain dire medical conditions. The growing universe of CBD products—powerful cures and spa-day fun alike—is threatened by overzealous regulators, some of whom insist that CBD be classed among the most dangerous drugs.
That means the people who stand to benefit most—the sickest and most desperate CBD users—remain at grave risk. CBD, then, is caught between two worlds: the medical reality of its effectiveness in large doses on the one hand, and the popular image of a tasty, calming, faddish cure-all on the other. The story of today's CBD resurgence starts in , when Paige Figi of Colorado put her 5-year-old daughter, Charlotte, in hospice care. Doctors thought she had a few weeks left to live, a few months at most.
For most of Charlotte's brief life, Figi and her husband had been on a fruitless quest to alleviate the violent seizures their daughter suffered as a result of Dravet syndrome, a rare and incurable form of epilepsy whose sufferers have a life expectancy of about eight years. By the time Charlotte turned 5, her parents had tried just about every treatment available. Yet Charlotte still needed a feeding tube to eat and was debilitated by seizures that came on at all times of day and night. You're just sort of throwing darts aimlessly.
Even after all those failures, there was one more thing Charlotte's parents wanted to try. During the hundreds of hours Figi spent researching Dravet syndrome, she came across studies from Israel and Europe that showed that CBD worked as an anticonvulsant and could possibly keep Charlotte's seizures at bay.
Figi wanted to administer CBD to her daughter. She found translators so she could talk to physicians and researchers in Israel and France. From these distant mentors, she learned how to extract CBD from marijuana, how to dose it, and how to test its purity. The only remaining obstacle was finding a doctor who would recommend giving a cannabis derivative to a kindergartner.
While federal law is shifting all the time, in CBD was illegal. As a compound that could be derived from cannabis, it was classified as a Schedule I drug, meaning it had no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. It was therefore illegal to manufacture, possess, sell, purchase, or consume.
Even in pioneering Colorado, then home to a very liberal medical marijuana system, giving CBD to a small child was a tough sell. After 18 months, Figi stepped forward to announce that her daughter was free of seizures and no longer taking any medication aside from CBD.
Sanjay Gupta, a physician and talking head, flew to Colorado to meet the Figis and eventually created a series of CNN specials on medical marijuana that sparked national interest in Charlotte's case. In the years since, parents of epileptic children have moved their families to Colorado in order to gain access to reliable and legal-to-administer CBD. Following Paige Figi's advocacy, several red-state legislatures legalized CBD while leaving marijuana itself and other cannabinoids illegal.
CBD doesn't "cure" Dravet syndrome; it only treats the most dangerous symptoms. Dravet patients will still have drastically shorter lives than average, and not all of them will respond equally well to CBD, because every patient is different.
But there is no longer any question among medical professionals that CBD works as an anti-epileptic drug. This year, CBD made an appearance at In Goop Health, the conference hosted by actress and wellness entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow, as part of a panel devoted to the health effects of marijuana and associated products.
Once you know what it is, you start to see it everywhere. Among cannabis policy analysts and the people who report on drug policy, Armentano has a reputation for possessing an almost encyclopedic knowledge of marijuana research. When we talked in October, he expressed irritation at shady actors promoting CBD for applications that haven't been studied and for hawking CBD health products that contain so little of the active ingredient that they may as well be sugar pills.
They are marketers and advertisers, and they have done a hell of a job. Which is a shame, because CBD does work quite well for some things and, with additional research, may turn out to work quite well for others. In an email, Armentano pointed to peer-reviewed research suggesting that, in addition to epilepsy, CBD holds promise for treating cancer, diabetes, inflammation, migraines, and even schizophrenia and substance abuse.
Many makers and marketers of CBD products have latched onto these glimmers of efficacy to promote watered-down products that may or may not contain actual CBD in addition to other cannabinoids in varying doses. This kind of sloppy extrapolation is a regular occurrence in the nutritional supplement industry, where compounds frequently make the leap from lab to bottle with little or no input from clinical researchers.
A lot can get lost in translation, such as the minimum dosage required for a compound to be effective or the best route of administration. A highly rated and reviewed one-ounce bottle of hemp oil I found online delivers 8. A person would need to consume nearly a bottle per day to achieve the therapeutic effects seen in peer-reviewed CBD studies. Curious as to whether Armentano was exaggerating the extent of this problem, I then looked at the label information of more than a dozen highly reviewed CBD products marketed to adults.
Not one of them contained even half the dose of marijuana-derived CBD recommended for a child suffering from seizures. But some of these products did sound tasty and look chic: An elegantly boxed candy described itself as "pure CBD gumdrops…made by hand in small batches from five simple ingredients: natural fruit essences, gelatin, citric acid, sugar and the finest full-spectrum phytocannabinoid-rich CBD extract. While they're probably delicious, each piece of candy contains only 20 milligrams of CBD, according to the packaging.
That's one-tenth the amount used in the adult migraine trial and one-fifth the minimum dose required by a child with Dravet syndrome. Various CBD products available on Amazon contain roughly the same amount or a few milligrams more per dose—still nowhere close to the therapeutic doses used in research. This is not nitpicking. Dosing is an essential aspect of getting specific therapeutic results for specific ailments.
Several studies have shown that CBD has a "bell-shaped dose-response curve," as one Brazilian report notes. In that study, which tested CBD as a treatment for anxiety in adults, 57 men were divided into four groups and given three different doses of CBD, plus a placebo. The group that received mg of CBD had the best results, while the placebo group, the mg group, and the mg group fared much worse. There is, in other words, a sweet spot. While the compound is gaining acceptance as a life-changing medicine for the chronically and terminally ill, its explosive popularity as a hot new luxury self-care product rests on shaky ground.
And it's not clear how many consumers or sellers have a clue what they're doing. Sometimes the therapeutic and recreational markets get tangled up. The twin issues of provenance and purity are of special concern to people who are genuinely sick yet still unable to obtain CBD through traditional medical channels. Not all Dravet syndrome sufferers will respond equally well, because every patient is different.
What about this product? Like Paige Figi, Cotte has become a sherpa for parents of children with rare diseases. He speaks around the U. Yet it's hard to blame consumers for feeling baffled.
The "green rush" that started in , when Colorado and Washington state legalized recreational cannabis, has attracted the energies of not just good Samaritans, scientists, and honest entrepreneurs but also hustlers, scam artists, and people who don't know much about what they're selling. Pulling CBD from hemp rather than the marijuana plant has become a flashpoint inside the cannabis world. While the two are in the same family, hemp is a heftier strain.
It's used to make fabric and rope, not drugs. You can't get high smoking hemp or make edibles from it. While it does contain trace amounts of cannabidiol, all of the clinical research into CBD to date has used derivatives of the marijuana plant, not hemp.
The law's definition of "marihuana" excludes "the mature stalks" of Cannabis sativa , along with any "derivative" of the stalks, "oil or cake made from the seeds," and the seeds themselves if they have been sterilized to prevent germination. In addition to those exemptions, a federal law allowed limited cultivation of "industrial hemp," defined as Cannabis sativa with a THC content of "not more than 0.
In May , the agency released an internal directive informing staff that "products and materials that are made from the cannabis plant and which fall outside the CSA definition of marijuana such as sterilized seeds, oil or cake made from the seeds, and mature stalks are not controlled under the CSA.
But as researcher Jamie Corroon and attorney Rod Kight noted in an October paper for Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research , while "these statements clarified that CBD derived from a source other than cannabis was lawful, they did not specifically state that CBD from industrial hemp was lawful. Hemp's murky legal status doesn't necessarily make it a good source of CBD.
The vast majority of CBD products available on sites like Amazon, for instance, use CBD derived from hemp, and many vendors are not clear about where that hemp was grown. Perhaps more important, potential buyers may not have a clear idea of what to look for. West thinks there are several ways to provide clarity to consumers, including putting more information on product labels, creating a third-party testing group, and sharing lab results with sellers and buyers although this last option requires lab testing , which is not cheap.
Sometimes it's full of toxins. Toxins is a buzzword among crunchy hypochondriacs, but Cotte is talking about the very real risk posed by drugs sold in black or gray markets. A random CBD product you buy on Amazon or at your local head shop is unlikely to contain a contaminant such as illicit fentanyl, but it might not contain what the label claims, either.
In late , more than 30 people were admitted to emergency rooms in Utah after consuming "Yolo CBD oil. This dangerous, lab-made drug, meant to mimic the effects of THC, caused seizures and vomiting. What's more, the Yolo bottles contained no actual CBD.
A paper in Medical Cannabis and Cannabinoids , published by the European academic house Karger, highlighted this information asymmetry. Consumers know only what they see on the label and in most cases have no third party to help them make decisions. As a result, the paper's authors warned, consumers are ignorant of the "residual presence of toxic solvents used during the extraction procedure" and do not know whether a formulation contains heavy metals absorbed from soil, excessive pesticides sprayed on the plants themselves, or non-CBD drugs designed to give users the sense that the product "works.
Aside from the incident in Utah, very few products marketed as containing mostly or exclusively CBD have proven to be harmful. But the available data suggest the market has been flooded with crappy products created by companies, both foreign and domestic, hoping to cash in on the hype.
Even for CBD products that are made and dosed correctly and that do work, there's an additional hurdle. With a single exception, this entire product sector cannot legally market itself as medically better than the hyped placebos it's competing against.
The interplay between THC, CBD, and the hundreds of other active compounds in the cannabis plant could one day be isolated, identified. Green Leaves CBD Oil is an extract from the hemp plant. It makes body inactive organs active and the active organ more powerful.
R oll up, roll up, ladies and gentleman, and gather around. Do you, your loved one — or family pet — suffer from any of the following conditions? All can be treated, claim the snake oil salesmen of the modern wild west, with the miracle cure-all: CBD, or cannabidiol. What a giddy array of products there are: from CBD water sold in clear bottles that mean the sensitive compound swiftly degrades , to cooking or massage oils, pills, chewing gum, transdermal patches, pessaries, gin, beer and lube. The crown for silliest CBD product of the year, however, belongs indisputably to the CBD-infused pillowcases sold by one hopeful firm of US fabric-makers.
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Scam CBD Companies You Should Probably Stay Away From
The CBD market is unregulated. This is a scary thought because it suggests that responsibility rests on the consumer to find a good source of CBD oil. Unfortunately, a lot of scam products exist out there. At best, a scam product will contain no CBD and cheat you out of your hard-earned money. At worst, it could contain chemicals and harm your health. Well, there are some vital signs which distinguish a high-quality CBD oil from a waste of money.
Is CBD a Miracle Cure or a Marketing Scam? (Both.)
A vast number of different CBD products and manufacturers on the market can cause quite a lot of confusion when deciding which CBD oil to buy. Although users who want, or should we say expect the best medicinal value , always try to find a quality Full Spectrum CBD oils as they are in most cases much more effective. When we decide which CBD oil we want to buy, we need to realize, that there is a ton of misinformation on the internet about CBD, countless mislabeled products and shady companies that are scamming innocent people just for the sake of profit. CBD cannabidiol has a lot of medicinal benefits and great therapeutic potential on its own. This is also important when we are reading the label of a CBD oil and try to gather as much info as possible. From this label we can learn:. We can say that this product probably contains CBD Isolate, but it is mislabeled. The analysis results are usualy presented in numbers percentage and weigth , but are sometimes found in graph form for easier understanding.
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As marijuana is legalized in more and more states , the wellness world has whipped itself into a frenzy over a non-intoxicating cannabis derivative called cannabidiol. CBD products can be found on the internet and in health-food stores, wellness catalogs and even bookstores. A bookstore in downtown Boulder, Colorado, displays a case of CBD products between the cash register and the stacks of new releases. But, uh, what is it that CBD is supposed to do?
Green Leaves CBD Oil UK Reviews: Does it Really Work Or Scam?
With so many CBD products available in high street shops and online stores, you may also expect to find some on Amazon or eBay. Surprisingly, CBD products are banned by both platforms, creating the perfect environment for scammers. Their findings gave them a unique insight into avoiding a scam and selecting quality oils. It is likely that most of these oils contain little more than hemp seed oil. They also ban all CBD products, but they seem confused when asked why. When they were questioned by their customers they responded :. It is likely that most of these products are mostly hemp seed oil or something similar. To find out if it is possible to identify genuine CBD oils, we spoke to Daniel, co-founder of for the Ageless:. No, unless either site makes significant changes to their guidelines, it is unlikely that you will find good-quality CBD oil there. Look carefully at the label and product description. Always start with a retailer who has a good reputation. This might be a recommendation from a friend, good reviews on Trustpilot or they could be a member of an industry body like CannaPro or the Cannabis Trades Association. These are documents that display the results of lab tests carried out by an independent company.
Cannabis has great medical potential. But don’t fall for the CBD scam
Check out our list of CBD scam companies below. One of the biggest problems with new industries like CBD is the influx of scams that come along with it. The CBD industry has only really come to life in the last 5 years. Prior to this, there were few CBD-friendly laws, and only a handful of innovative, cutting-edge companies operating in the space. Since then, the popularity of CBD products has skyrocketed to become one of the most lucrative health supplements the world has ever seen. As a result, dozens of scam artists and entrepreneurs with poor integrity have stepped into the market with trash products and sketchy payment plans.
